Undercover Policing

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 24th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend will be well aware that decisions on whether the police investigate individuals and alleged offences are an operational matter for the police, and that it is for the police, with the Crown Prosecution Service, to decide whether those investigations lead to charges and prosecution. However, I recognise the degree of concern that he raises. Phone hacking by some aspects of the press has caused disquiet in this House for some time. Suggestions that it could have been more widespread are, of course, equally worrying.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I welcome the Home Secretary’s statement and join her in condemning the shocking revelations that were made in relation to the Lawrence family. The Select Committee on Home Affairs published its report on undercover police officers on 1 March. It expressed deep concern that Operation Herne had taken 20 months, cost £1.2 million and involved 23 officers, and yet nobody had been arrested. Chief Constable Creedon is a full-time serving chief constable. Frankly, with 50,000 documents to look through it will take years to resolve this matter. We need a timetable. What words of comfort does she have for the families whose dead children’s identities have been used by undercover agents? I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) that the time has come to look seriously at a public inquiry into the use of undercover agents.

Family Migration Rules

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 19th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather). I am sure she will not mind me reminding her of this, but it is the coalition Government, of whom she was a member, who originally proposed the rules and put them through the House. I respect her late conversion to condemning the Government publicly for what they are doing, and I know she feels sincerely about that.

[Sarah Teather]

I assure the right hon. Gentleman that, as I am sure the Minister would accept, I say nothing in public that I did not say in private.

[Keith Vaz]

I am sure that is the case, which is why I gave the hon. Lady a wildcard. Of course I am sure that, privately, she was very much against the rules when she was a Minister in the Government who put them through the House.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma), whom I have known for more than 35 years, on securing this debate. Even before he became a Member of Parliament, he took up immigration issues in Southall for almost a quarter of a century through the Indian Workers' Association, as a councillor, as the lord mayor of Ealing and as a prospective parliamentary candidate, so it is no surprise that he should be introducing this debate and that he served on the inquiry organised by the all-party group on migration.

All those who served on the inquiry, including my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), the hon. Member for Brent Central, the noble Baroness Hamwee and others, have done the House a great service. I wish the Select Committee on Home Affairs had time to consider the rules, but being pressed so often by the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) to take up new and exciting inquiries, we just did not have time to do so. The all-party group has produced a stunning report, which everyone needs to read with great care.

For those of us who do immigration cases every day, and I see Members here who represent constituencies in Birmingham, Manchester and Leicester, including my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth), my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock) and others—I cannot name every constituency—there is the line in the Lord’s prayer that says

“Give us today our daily bread.”

Immigration cases are our daily bread and butter. Every single Friday, immigration cases are 90% of the work I do in my surgery. Although the Minister, who represents the Forest of Dean, and the shadow Minister, who represents Rhondda, do not have the casework that we have, those of us who have seen the Minister perform before the Select Committee and have heard the shadow Minister’s comments know that they understand our concerns on immigration. For us, as constituency MPs, immigration is a big deal. I am glad to see the Minister here today, and I am sorry that he is on crutches. It is better to be on crutches before the debate than after.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall and the hon. Member for Brent Central have already stated the facts—why bring in an arbitrary figure? Tony McNulty was wrong to bring in the points-based system, and I told him so at the time. He thought it was a great invention. I went to see him when he was Minister for Immigration, and he said, “It is very important that people tot up the points, and then you know whether they qualify to come in under the points-based system.” I said, “Where is the discretion in all this? What about those cases that don’t reach the number of points but where there might be grounds for compassion?” The hon. Member for Brent Central talked about that, and my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall talked about other issues. What about those issues that the entry clearance officers cannot address because the migrant does not have enough points?

Here is another example on the arbitrary figure. Yes, we know that the Migration Advisory Committee advised on the figure and, yes, we know there are lots of statistical surveys that say the sum should be £18,600, but as the Chair of the Select Committee on Justice, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), said, the average wage in his constituency is not £18,600. The average wage is certainly not £18,600 in Leicester East and Leicester South; it is about £16,000 or even less—in fact, it is £4,000 less than the national average according to the Office for National Statistics. I have people coming into my surgery who will never get their spouse into the country—even those who are working very hard indeed. I say to them, “Why don’t you get another job?” They cannot get another job because they are exhausted from working up to 60 hours a week. I know that is not the minimum wage, and it may not be lawful, but that is what is on their little slips.

[Dr Whitehead]

My right hon. Friend might be surprised to learn the results of a survey carried out among the members of a Southampton mosque by my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham). Some 95% of the mosque’s members earn less than £18,000 a year. The rules therefore effectively ban an entire community from rights that we would accede to any other community in this country.

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Thousands of people who wish to bring their spouse into this country now cannot do so. For a Government who came to power saying that they wanted to engage with the ethnic minority communities—I have seen the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and every senior member of the Government at big functions for the ethnic minority communities so many times, and they really want to reach out like no other Conservative Government have ever done before—introducing a rule that will cause huge damage to the Government at the next election is electorally disastrous for the Conservative party, not that the Government need advice from me on electoral disasters ahead of the next election. That goes against everything the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have said at Diwali and Eid functions, which is that they want a community in which people feel at peace with each other and get on well together. Introducing an arbitrary figure disfranchises thousands and thousands of people.

As the hon. Member for Brent Central said, why do it? Is it because the Government want to stop abuse? I do not think so because, as I discovered this morning—even I did not know about this, which just goes to show how quickly such things happen—the Government have increased the probation period from two years to five years. People cannot get indefinite leave to remain if they are on benefits, so it is not a question of people arriving and going on benefits, because doing so means they cannot get to the next stage on the way to citizenship. Abuse is better dealt with through face-to-face interviews, such as those the Minister saw when he went to Sheffield—he saw people who are coming here as students being interviewed. If we do that for spouses, we can address abuse much better than putting in an arbitrary financial limit. The purpose, of course, is to limit the number of people coming here.

We are an island, and we all understand that we cannot have unlimited migration to Britain. We understand that, and I hope the Labour party understands that when it was in government it made mistakes in its operation of the UK Border Agency. From what the Select Committee has heard from the Minister, we know he understands that he needs to address the problem. I think he is genuine in his desire to try to address the organisational issues. The fact remains that there is no coherent and cogent reason for the limit. I would like an explanation from the Minister. I would understand it if entry clearance directors were given discretion to tell applicants who had an offer of a job in this country, “You haven’t reached the limit, but you have a job offer in Leicester. You’ll go over the limit as soon as you arrive in the United Kingdom, so we’ll grant you a visa.” However, there seems to be no explanation for the current arrangements.

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

Let me tell my right hon. Friend of a case I have. A man who has been made redundant cannot get his Canadian wife into the country in the normal way. She was a teacher in this country for three years before she returned with him to Canada and they married. She could get a job immediately she sets foot in this country, but she is not allowed to move here.

[Keith Vaz]

I can well understand that case. We all have similar cases, which are heart-rending, but there is nothing we can do, because the rules are so rigid.

When my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), the shadow Immigration Minister, stands up, I hope that he will say that the Labour party will look again at the threshold at the next election. I am sorry to tell him that I think the Labour party has been very quiet on this issue. Now that we have the report on migration, which points to the problems experienced at a practical level, we would like to know what the official Opposition will do about the rule. My hon. Friend came to Leicester and listened carefully to what my constituents and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South said, but we need to have some thinking on these issues, rather than blanket, rigid rules that seek to stop people coming into this country.

My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) and the hon. Member for Brent Central said that getting dependants into this country is no longer on the agenda and that people simply cannot do it. Frankly, the dependants I know who have come to this country have come only from east Africa, because of the nature of Leicester. They stay only a short time, and then they want to go back; they are just grateful to be able to come here whenever they can.

My last point is about rights of appeal for people who are visiting, which the coalition Government are about to take away. If they do that, they will put even more pressure on our immigration service—this will, I am sure, be the subject of the next report by the all-party group on migration. If they remove the right of appeal, which is extremely important because it means that a judge, rather than the Home Office, can make a determination, they will take away the one guarantee of absolute fairness in the system. I put it to the Minister that there needs to be an independent review when cases are turned down. An entry clearance manager and director should not be reviewing a decision by an entry clearance officer, when they see them every day, in the evening and in their post.

I am not casting aspersions on anyone in any case, but the perception is that things are not fair. We have some fantastic entry clearance directors, such as Janice Moore in Mumbai and Mandy Iveny in Pakistan, but there are only a few we could name as being people to whom we could go to solve a problem. I ask the Minister to look again at the issues of discretion and review. In the time he has been doing his job—certainly in his dealings with the Home Affairs Committee, as the hon. Member for Cambridge will confirm—he has shown that he actually listens and considers what is put forward. I therefore hope he will listen to what the all-party group has said and to what we are saying today.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

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[Kate Green]

That is right, and that is one of the perversities in the operation of the rules. Some families who could be floated off benefits if there were two adults in the household are being forced to remain on benefits because a second earner will not be coming to support the family—which may be a family with children. The hon. Member for Brent Central alluded to the fact that in some cases parents are forced to rely on benefits because they cannot share the responsibility for care of children with the other parent. Also, not being able to bring a spouse into the country to share the balance of parenting and working will affect the ability of the parent who is already here to enter the labour market or increase their working hours. We know sharing those roles is a feature of lifting families out of poverty; those two sets of earnings are important in keeping families off out-of-work benefits.

Quite a large part of the Government’s assessment of the benefits that would be affected has to do with benefits for children—child benefit and child tax credit. They are paid for children who are British citizens. In some cases they will continue for those children, but in a family in which only one parent is here to support the child; so the overall benefits impact is rather more complicated than the Government suggest.

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Did she find that mostly, in the case of people who gave evidence to the inquiry committee and wanted to bring in male spouses, those spouses wanted to work when they arrived, not sit at home? Obviously, they could not claim benefits, because it would be against their undertaking, but most want to arrive and work, so they would soon be over the threshold anyway.

[Kate Green]

That is right. Indeed, we already know that migrant male workers are more likely to be in work than non-migrant people of working age. The history of migrants, and particularly male migrants, arriving in this country is that they want and intend to work, and contribute to our Exchequer and the wider economy. Women migrants may be less likely to work than non-migrant adult women, but their earnings tend to be a little higher; so, again, the labour market picture is more complicated than the simple notion that may have been assumed—that a spouse coming to this country will simply be dependent. In fact, the opposite is often the case.

As the hon. Member for Brent Central said, we need to recognise some of the more indirect costs that we are piling up for society. I absolutely agree with her about the potential long-term impact on the public purse of separating children from their parents for long periods. We know that separation can have long-standing and detrimental effects on children’s health, including their mental health, and on their educational attainment and behaviour, all of which will increase costs to the public purse down the line. The Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England has made a strong case for children’s right to have their best interests taken into account as one of the factors considered by the Government, but it is important to recognise that not only a moral and legal but an economic case can be made in relation to children. The Government should also consider the long-term economic impact.

The committee and I ask Ministers for a much more comprehensive review and assessment of the fiscal and economic impact of the policy, in both the short and longer term. The rules are causing hardship. They are riddled with inconsistencies. In some cases, I believe them to be discriminatory under our equalities legislation, and in terms of protecting the public purse, it seems that they may in fact be having a perverse effect. For those reasons, the committee strongly urges the Government to take the time to conduct a full review of the impact of the new rules on families and communities, and specifically to examine further the effect on the public purse.

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is a delight to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. I join the congratulations that have been rightly heaped on my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) on securing this debate, and on those involved in the all-party parliamentary group and the report. Without the vast resources that the Government would have for a full investigation, the all-party group has produced an important piece of work, and I was delighted to be at its launch last week.

I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green)—who made an important contribution to this debate, just as she did to the process of bringing together the report—and the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather). It was a delight to hear from a Conservative as well, in the shape of the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell), who, as we all know, has taken a strong interest in these issues and pursued them with an open mind and an interest in getting to the truth rather than dealing with the facile arguments that we sometimes hear about immigration in the media.

I take issue slightly with the Chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz). He said that because the Minister and I represent constituencies without large amounts of immigration casework, we somehow might not be as kosher in this debate as others. I say to him, first, that I suspect that people in the Rhondda take as great an interest in the issue of immigration as people in his constituency, but may come to a different set of conclusions about it. Secondly, in the Rhondda, we would not have the population that we currently have were it not for migration: particularly from Ireland and England, but also from Italy in the 19th century. Learning long-term lessons about immigration and migration is far more important than chasing daily or monthly headlines on those issues, and that is certainly what I hope to do as shadow immigration Minister.

I make one other point to the Chair of the Select Committee. The average wage in my constituency is considerably lower than the £18,600 threshold, so the immigration cases that I do have all arise from the rule change.

[Keith Vaz]

I would never accuse the shadow immigration Minister of chasing headlines. The point that I was making is that the Members here today, apart from those on the Front Benches, have a heavy case load. I said—he can check Hansard; I know that he is keen on people reading it—that despite the fact that he and the Minister represent the Rhondda and the Forest of Dean, they do have an understanding of the issues. I urge him to look at Hansard before he gets on his high horse again.

[Chris Bryant]

I was not very much on my high horse; I was just using an opportunity to tease my right hon. Friend. Anyway, he has risen to the bait, which is a great delight for us all.

I agree with many of hon. Members’ remarks. Largely thanks to several campaigning organisations, my inbox for the past year has been absolutely full of individual cases, not from my constituency but from all around the country. I will quote a few words from various people; I will not name them. One man wrote:

“I am at breaking point and I can see no chance of being a family, it is breaking our hearts”.

Another wrote:

“We feel trapped by our circumstances. I feel like I’m a prisoner in my own country!”

Both are British people unable to sponsor people to come here. Another wrote:

“This makes me feel extremely angry at the present government and very sad to be a British citizen treated in this way.”

There is certainly a great deal of distress out there. That might be because there has been a change in the law and many people were proceeding on the assumption that there would not be, so they have been suddenly caught out, but we should not underestimate the pain caused. At the same time, I accept that a fundamental duty of Government is to protect the public purse, which I do not think anyone would dispute. When there are real financial problems in the UK, which we need to sort out, it is all the more important for our public services to be protected and for the taxpayer to be protected. Furthermore, everyone accepts that a fundamental duty of Government is to ensure that the system is not open to abuse.

Use of the family route to circumvent immigration rules is small; it does exist and, indeed, I have had cases in my own constituency, but we need to look at it as the years go forward. Women have married someone from abroad, and the man has come to the UK, but, as soon as the marriage has happened, he disappears. We need to tackle that, however, as a form of exploitation and criminality—we need to look at whether there are further changes in the law we need to make.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

The right to a family life is obviously an important part of what we all accept to be intrinsic to humanity, but it is a qualified right—it always has been under human rights legislation. If it were not a qualified right, we would not be able to imprison someone who was married. I do not want to say that the right is categorical and exists in all positions, but my hon. Friend makes a fair point.

A Catch-22 now arises for many people: if they are the carer of a child and the other parent cannot be present, they might not be able to engage in a full-time job, so they cannot earn the £18,600 that enables them to bring the other parent in. That puts many parents in a difficult situation, and might end up placing a further burden on the state, rather than removing one, and would be a mistake.

As Members have said, it is also true that the effect of the changes is harsher in some parts of the country than in other parts. I suspect that that is why we have a large number of people from the more deprived constituencies in this Chamber today, rather than those from the country’s leafier suburbs. It is also true that the effect on women is disproportionate to that on men; because of the pay gap between men and women, many fewer women than men can achieve the £18,600 figure. Moreover, as the hon. Member for Brent Central mentioned, the report rightly makes the point that to all intents and purposes the adult dependent relative route has been closed: people have to be able to prove in this country that they have so much money, they can care for those dependants; in which case, people should care for them in the country in which the dependants live, unless they are so ill that they cannot stay there, in which case they probably could not travel anyway. We need to look at such issues.

[Keith Vaz]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Chris Bryant]

I will, although I am about to disagree again with my right hon. Friend.

[Keith Vaz]

When he does so, will he tell this Chamber what the official Opposition’s position is on the limit? Will it be removed if the Labour party gets into government, or is he planning to review the limit anyway in the next two years, to look at the impact that it is having on people?

[Chris Bryant]

If my right hon. Friend did not intervene, I would have more time to lay out what our plans are. I was about to say that he said the figure was arbitrary, but it is not arbitrary; it is deliberate. The Migration Advisory Committee advised on a range between £18,600 and £25,700—I suppose we should be grateful that the figure is not £25,700—and laid out that, according to its interpretation, at the lower bound of the range, 45% of applicants would not meet the income threshold. In other words, it is deliberate that 45% of people are caught by the limit. It is, therefore, important for us to look at the full impact of the policy—to look not only at the short-term implications, because I understand that it helps the Government to meet their net migration target, but at the full implications in the long run for the public purse and family life.

We undoubtedly have to examine some of the existing anomalies. Many who have written to me made the point, “It is fine if you can come in as a European economic area national; you don’t have to prove anything”, but that seems grossly unfair to someone coming in from outside the EEA. We need to look at such anomalies. We also need to look at what flexibility can be brought into the system. As many Members have said, a non-EEA partner’s earnings cannot be considered at the moment, even though they may be considerable. Ministers sometimes reply that people will be able to come in through a different route—a work route—but that does not apply to many, unless they have a specific job offer and so on. The way in which cash savings are estimated and the earnings of those who are self-employed similarly need to be looked at, as does whether third-party support can be brought into the equation, as it has been in several other countries.

I have already referred to the matter of the parliamentary process. I want us to engage in a proper process, so that Members can go through the legislation for any future change. We also need to assess the effect on the NHS, not only of people coming to this country, but of losing people who are working in the NHS—they might be worried about their elderly dependent relatives elsewhere in the world and decide to leave this country to go there. That issue is already affecting recruitment in south Wales and other places. Also, categorically, we will seek to repeal the Government’s recent abolition of the right of appeal for family visits. It seems quintessentially fair that someone coming to a funeral, wedding or some such occasion should have a right of appeal.

I have one final point to make. The honest truth is that in future there will be more British people falling in love with foreigners. That is simply a fact: more people go on holiday—one in four people go on holiday to Spain each year and one in six to Greece—and they go much further afield for their holidays than they ever have done before. Many of those people are not on vast incomes, but they end up falling in love. That is why we need to—we must—keep the issue under permanent review.

Jane Austen wrote:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

I do not entirely agree, but I suggest a different version: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every family’s set of circumstances is different.” The law needs to be able to cater for that, rather than the opposite.

EU Police, Justice and Home Affairs

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I must make a bit of progress first.

We have been struggling to find out what the Government are actually doing, and what their position actually is on these important measures. Today’s edition of The Guardian gave us some clues. It states that the Prime Minister is expected to opt into 30 to 40 measures, that a deal is being done by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the Minister for Government Policy, the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr Letwin), who sits in the Cabinet Office, and that

“the Tories want to opt back in to no more than 29”

so that they can say that they opted out of 100.

“The Lib Dems, who had been pressing for… 70…recently settled on a figure of about 45.

Ministers are planning to split the difference between 45 and 29, meaning the coalition will sign up to about 35 of the measures.”

This, it appears, is a numbers game. It is no way to decide on serious issues that affect the fight against crime and future justice for victims. However, we think it excellent that the Government have handed over negotiations to the right hon. Member for West Dorset. We recall that the last time the Prime Minister tried that, in relation to Leveson, the Cabinet Office Minister came over to our place and allowed us to draft the policy. We are quite happy to do that again if the Government cannot sort it out.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I realise that my right hon. Friend would quite like the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr Letwin) to be involved in these discussions, but I am a bit perplexed by the situation. Such an important question should really involve the Home Secretary. Does my right hon. Friend not agree that the Home Secretary should be there making the deals, rather than the Cabinet Office and the Treasury?

[Yvette Cooper]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. The issue is immensely important and there must be a question about where the Home Secretary is in these discussions. Where is the voice for British policing? Where is the voice for law enforcement? Where is the voice for British victims? If she is not being heard on behalf of the police and of victims, she is letting them down.

Let me consider some of the key measures that the Government are threatening to opt out of. The police have said that the most important to them is the European arrest warrant, which gives them the power to arrest people here who are wanted for crimes back home, gives the courts the power to send them swiftly home to face justice, means that police forces abroad will act to arrest suspected criminals who have fled from justice here and means that courts across Europe can send those suspects swiftly back.

The teacher who ran off to France with a pupil was arrested under the warrant and returned within weeks. The man who tried to blow up the tube at Shepherd’s Bush was quickly returned from Italy. However, as I told the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), it took 10 years of legal wrangling to send a suspected terrorist back to France before the European arrest warrant was introduced.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs May]

I will move on to the principles that the Government will follow when looking at each and every measure and considering whether to opt back in. In her speech, the right hon. Lady made something of an issue about the timetable and asked why we had not yet come to a decision. I refer her to the remarks of the former Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, in the debate on the Lisbon treaty in 2008. She said that

“on the whole body of police, criminal and judicial measures that are transferred, it is our decision—six months before that five-year period finishes—as to whether we want to continue in those measures, if they have not been renegotiated or repealed during that time. We will make that decision on the basis of whether continuing in those measures, with ECJ jurisdiction, is in the national interest. We have negotiated the ability to make that decision and we have negotiated that transitional period.”—[Official Report, 29 January 2008; Vol. 471, c. 175.]

That is precisely what this Government are following.

My statement on 15 October last year set out the Government’s approach: we intend to opt out of all police and criminal justice measures that pre-date the Lisbon treaty and then negotiate with the Commission and other member states to opt back into those individual measures that it is in our national interest to rejoin. That remains the Government’s position.

As I explained in a letter to the Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), in November last year, we will consider how a measure contributes to public safety and security, whether practical co-operation is underpinned by it, and whether there would be a detrimental impact on such co-operation if it was pursued by other means. We will also consider the impact of each measure on our civil rights and traditional liberties.

[Keith Vaz]

The Home Affairs Committee certainly looks forward to receiving the list when the Home Secretary has it ready. There is a measure on her desk at the moment concerning Europol that is not related to the opt-in/opt-out issue. It is very important that we sign up to it, because it affects the governance of that organisation, and I know that she is a supporter of Rob Wainwright and Europol. Is she now in a position to sign up to that new regulation?

[Mrs May]

The right hon. Gentleman is right that the Commission has brought forward some new proposals relating to Europol. Some parts of the proposals cause concern to the Government, and indeed those of most member states across the European Union, but there will be a debate in this House—at the beginning of July, I believe—on whether the Government propose to opt back into that measure. The scrutiny is continuing, but obviously the Government will make clear our position when the debate takes place.

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[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) who, along with other Members of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, will consider the list of opt-ins and opt-outs when the Home Secretary eventually sends it to the Committee, to the Select Committee on Justice and to the European Scrutiny Committee. I agree with a lot of what he said. International co-operation in the EU is vital and Europol and Eurojust are important. I have just returned from a visit to Europol and was very impressed by the work done by Rob Wainwright and his team. I am glad that the Home Secretary is giving the House another opportunity to debate the issue in July before she decides whether to sign the important regulation that will allow us to be part of framing the next steps for Europol.

I congratulate the former Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), and the former Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), on all the work they have done. My thanks go more than to anyone else to the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), for giving us the chance to discuss this measure in her precious Opposition time—and to do so in prime time, rather than at the end of the day, which is when we normally discuss European issues. I repeat what all other right hon. and hon. Members have said about the importance of data-sharing, of knowing who is coming into our country and who is going out and of ensuring that those who have committed crimes and need to be returned to their country are returned as quickly as possible.

European co-operation also means that if there are problems with certain measures, we should consider them. There are problems with the European arrest warrant, although not with the principle or vision behind the scheme. We certainly need it, for the reasons given by the shadow Home Secretary. The difficulties are that some EU countries are issuing European arrest warrants for fairly trivial offences and at the moment each extradition under the European arrest warrant costs £18,000. The total cost to the British public in 2012 of actioning these warrants was £27 million, and figures from the Council of Europe showed that other European countries made 6,760 extradition requests to Britain in 2011—that is more than 130 a week, representing a 48% rise year on year.

I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) will speak in this debate, but since he came into the House he has highlighted the importance of this issue, and other right hon. and hon. Members from across the House have given specific examples of when their constituents have not been, in their view, fairly treated by the operation of the European arrest warrant.

In the same 12 months when the 48% year-on-year rise took place, the United Kingdom made just 205 requests for suspects wanted for crimes here and only 99 were handed over. Poland generates four in every 10 arrest warrants sent to Britain, and there has been an example of someone being extradited back to Poland and charged with stealing a wheelbarrow. I do not know whether that justifies £18,000 of taxpayers’ money, but it seems like a lot of judicial time and expense for something fairly trivial. I am glad that the motion talks about not only supporting the European arrest warrant, but reforming it, because asking individual countries such as Poland to think carefully about what they are doing is extremely important.

[Alan Johnson]

My right hon. Friend is making an interesting speech. Does he accept that one of the problems from Poland is that the Polish prosecution service does not have the discretion not to prosecute? Does he also accept that the work going on within the European Union with Poland has led to a 40% reduction in applications? Their number is still too high, but it is declining.

[Keith Vaz]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right about that and it explains why part of the process is to talk to these countries and bilaterally engage, not on how they could improve their system, because that would be too patronising, but by explaining the effect their system is having on our country. That is why I welcomed your recent historic visit to Romania, Mr Speaker, when you were the first Speaker of the House of Commons to address the Romanian Parliament in session. The importance of your visit and of the discussions that my right hon. Friend has mentioned is that we can try to persuade other EU countries of the need to co-operate. With Romania, that came through Operation Golf; it came through smashing those gangs that had ensured that so many young Romanian women and men had been trafficked. If we do not have this dialogue, it cannot work.

There are a few months left before this Government bring the measures before the Select Committees. I know that it is the Home Secretary’s decision, but the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), is very assiduous, and I know he enjoys appearing before the Home Affairs Committee—and we enjoy having him—so I say to him that we would prefer that not to be done the week before the House votes, as is sometimes the case. Until I raised the issue of Europol with the Home Secretary she had not replied to my letter and told me that there was going to be a debate on Europol in the first week of July.

I am sorry if I sound like the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash)—perhaps I am turning into him—but the issue is that Parliament cannot scrutinise the measures in the European Parliament, and that is why the EU gets such a bad name: we get these measures in the British House of Commons far too late, we do not have enough time to debate them, only the usual suspects turn up at the debate and people think there is something wrong with all of us just because we want to talk about European issues. The best way to avoid that is to let us have this list quickly.

We are deciding on our programme in the Home Affairs Committee and we are going to visit Poland to talk to the Polish chief justice and others, including the judges. These are the people who are issuing the European arrest warrants in such numbers—as I said, 40% of these warrants come from Poland. We can arrange all that only if we know when the list will come to us. I hope that when the Minister winds up we will have a decision on that.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

Oral Answers to Questions

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I am as eager as my hon. Friend is to see justice done at the end of this episode, but I am sure that he will understand that the service of justice would not be improved by my providing a running commentary, from the Dispatch Box, on an ongoing criminal investigation.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The Commissioner promised a ruthless search for the truth when he established Operation Alice, but, as the hon. Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway) said, this has taken eight months, involved 30 investigating police officers and cost the taxpayer £144,000 for an incident in Downing street that lasted 45 seconds. We are not asking for a running commentary; we are just asking the Minister when we can have a timetable so that this and other investigations currently costing £23 million in terms of past errors by the police are investigated thoroughly but quickly?

[Damian Green]

This is an investigation done partly by the Metropolitan police, who are operationally independent, and by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, so it is not for Ministers to set timetables. Indeed, I urge the House to recognise that to ask Ministers to intervene closely and in detail in the work of operationally independent police forces or the IPCC would be the wrong way to go.

Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

In three years, the Government have made significant strides in cutting crime and reforming the police. Since 2010, crime has fallen by more than 10%. This is in no small measure down to the professionalism and dedication of police officers and police staff working day in, day out to keep our neighbourhoods safe. The reduction in crime has been achieved against the backdrop of a difficult financial climate for the police, as for other public services. We have taken the decisions necessary to restore this country’s long-term economic well-being. We have been able to mitigate the impact of diminished resources because we have allowed officers to focus on their core task of cutting crime. We have thrown off the straitjacket of national targets and freed up the front line from pointless form-filling and needless bureaucracy. Through the introduction of police and crime commissioners, we have revolutionised the accountability of police forces, and they are now far more responsive to local needs and priorities.

In the last Session, we legislated to set up the National Crime Agency which will, from the autumn, lead the fight against serious, organised and complex crime. The College of Policing is already firmly established and is leading the way in ensuring that the police operate to the highest professional standards. We are giving the Independent Police Complaints Commission the capacity it needs to investigate all serious allegations of misconduct. We cannot, however, afford to ease up on our reform programme. We cannot rest while the crime survey shows that there were 8.9 million crimes against adults last year. We cannot rest while businesses were the victims of more than 9 million crimes, or rest when the police recorded approximately 2.3 million incidents of antisocial behaviour, with many more going unreported.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I, and the Home Affairs Committee, support what the right hon. Lady is doing on the new landscape of policing. She listed a number of the organisations and described how they would fit into the new landscape. Has she made a decision on whether counter-terrorism is to remain with the Metropolitan police, or will it be placed with the new National Crime Agency?

[Mrs May]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his early remarks, and for the work of the Home Affairs Committee in its consideration of the Bill. We value its work. The answer to his question is no. It is still a matter for decision. I was clear, at an early stage, that it would not be right to make a decision on where counter-terrorism should sit before the Olympics or before the National Crime Agency was properly up and running. The legislation has now passed and we are working towards the formal and final launch of the NCA later this year.

The Bill marks the next stage of our reform programme to deal with the challenges we face.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend makes an important and valid point. All of us who talk about this issue should be clear about the difference and careful in the language we use. As he says, there is a real difference between an arranged marriage, where there has been consent, and a forced marriage, where there has not.

Part 10 contains a number of important policing reforms. First, it transfers to the College of Policing key statutory functions that are commensurate with, and appropriate to, its role in setting standards in policing. It will fall to the college to determine such matters as the qualifications for the appointment and promotion of police officers, and to issue codes of practice. In the longer term, we are continuing to explore how best to enshrine the college’s independence in law. This is properly a matter for debate in the context of the Bill, and I have no doubt it will be the subject of further discussion in Committee.

[Keith Vaz]

I am most grateful to the Home Secretary for giving way a second time. Is she as concerned as I am that the cost of a certificate in knowledge of policing will be £1,000? Does she think that will have an impact on her desire, and that of the whole House, to increase diversity in policing?

[Mrs May]

The right hon. Gentleman has cited a figure concerning the work being done by the College of Policing, but it is for the college to determine what requirements it will put in place for individuals regarding their initial ability to operate as a police officer, and the development they need to undertake as they progress through the ranks and acquire the necessary skills. It will be for the college to look carefully at the balance that will need to be struck to ensure that people can undertake that training and not be put off doing so. I believe that the College of Policing represents an important development in the policing landscape. As well as setting standards for training, development and skills, it will be a body in which best practice can be shared between police forces. That will have an impact on the ability of the police to fight crime.

On police reform, this part of the Bill will further strengthen the capability of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. I have already mentioned that we will build up the commission’s capacity by transferring resources from forces’ professional standards departments, but we also need to ensure that the IPCC has the appropriate remit and powers to operate effectively. Critically, the Bill will ensure that the IPCC has oversight of complaints made against those who are contracted to provide front-line services on behalf of the police.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins) in this important debate. I thank him for his kind comments about the Home Affairs Committee’s report on child grooming, which was published this morning. I pay tribute to all members of the Committee, who have worked so hard on the report, especially the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), who originally suggested that the Committee conduct the inquiry and who has been so assiduous in helping us to determine which witnesses should give evidence and in preparing the final report. It would not have been as powerful or important had it not been for what she has done.

I, too, am very interested in the hon. Gentleman’s proposals. He is right that this is one of the areas we have looked at. At the moment, the anecdotal evidence and the evidence of people who see with their own eyes that there is a problem are not sufficient to catch the terrible perpetrators of these horrific crimes. If we had legislation, that would help the situation enormously.

I am glad that there is agreement between the Front-Bench teams that there will be no vote on this measure. I agree that it is an important measure, but I also agree with the shadow Home Secretary that there are ways we can improve the Bill. It is important when we have such Bills that we use the Committee stage to do that. That will help to make it an even stronger and more powerful Bill.

I am glad that the Select Committee had the opportunity to scrutinise the draft Anti-social Behaviour Bill in a number of sessions. That happened not only because that was the decision of the Select Committee but because of the case of Fiona Pilkington, who committed suicide in October 2007 with her daughter after suffering years of abuse from local youths. The Independent Police Complaints Commission found in May 2011 that she had contacted the police 33 times in seven years. They failed to act accordingly and, as a result, she committed suicide with her daughter. I am glad that the new Leicester chief constable has changed things. Simon Cole has made this one of his priorities and we have accepted his assurance that that kind of situation will never happen again. Obviously, if we pass the Bill, that assurance will be even stronger.

Sadly, however, even though we had the case of Fiona Pilkington, four years later we had the inquest into the death of Dr Suzanne Dow, a lecturer in French at Nottingham university, who killed herself in 2011 after suffering antisocial behaviour from the crack house next door to her. The council ignored her pleas for over a year.

In January, the Select Committee recommended that there should be a national backstop of three complaints to set off the community trigger. We believe that that would guard against people such as Fiona Pilkington slipping through the net. Of course the Home Secretary is right: we also have to have a degree of local accountability. That has been one of the great features of her term as Home Secretary: she sets guidelines and a vision, and then she leaves it very much up to local people to complete the vision. She has done that with police and crime commissioners, to which I will come later. However, we believe strongly that, unless we have a national backstop, a figure that everyone could sign up to, there is a risk that locally people could make their own decisions, and we would end up with the trigger not being as great in Devon and Cornwall as it was in Somerset, Leicestershire and Derbyshire. That is why we felt that the trigger was important. I hope that, as it scrutinises the Bill, the Committee will look seriously at the Select Committee’s proposals. I am convinced that they will strengthen the Bill. That was the unanimous view of the Select Committee.

We should also, in looking at the Bill, express our concern about the cuts to youth services. It is right that we should be wary of young people who are involved in antisocial behaviour, but it is also important that we should not stigmatise them. A letter in The Times today was signed by practically everybody who is anybody in the voluntary sector that deals with these issues. It said that an injunction to prevent nuisance and annoyance could be used differently in different hands.

The annoyance and nuisance I feel would be different from that felt by someone else. I am 57 years of age this year—[Interruption.] Yes, it is true—just checking whether the House was still awake. The annoyance I feel in my office in Norman Shaw North may be different from that felt by younger Government Members with offices in Norman Shaw North who have just been elected. They may find the nuisance and annoyance not as great as I would because of my age. The same could be said for my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick), who has an office next to mine. His threshold may be different even from mine. We should look at the matter because the thresholds are different. It is important to read what those who signed the letter say. At the end they say:

“The coalition and opposition should listen to the call by the cross-party Home Affairs Committee to ‘end the arms race’ against Anti-social Behaviour by setting reasonable limits on the behaviour covered by the new powers.”

I have not quoted that just because they praise the Committee, but because we must look at this. On 7 January this year at 4 o’clock my constituent Rajesh Devaliya was ambushed by four young people in St Mark’s in Leicester, where he lives with his elderly father. The police said the young perpetrators of this crime had nothing else to do. The police were not condoning the crime, of course; they were talking about the cuts to local services in St Mark’s

I warmly welcome what the Home Secretary is proposing in clauses 100 and 101. Clause 100 introduces the new offence of possessing prohibited firearms with intent to supply, and clause 101 increases the penalty for unlawful importation of prohibited firearms from 10 years to life. That is the right thing to do, of course. It was recommended by the Committee, and we are happy to support it, as it will serve to bring to book those who are supplying as well as those who are using.

However, we looked at firearms two-and-a-half years ago, and we are concerned that two-and-a-half years on from our report the Home Secretary has not taken the opportunity this Bill presents to bring together the 34 separate pieces of legislation covering UK gun law. President Obama, in his bid to try to control firearms in the United States, is looking closely at what our country is doing as we have a better record than the United States of America, but it is important that we look at codifying and bringing all this legislation together.

On 17 May the Select Committee recommended criminalising forced marriage. We take the point that it is quite different from arranged marriage. However, I must tell the Home Secretary that I am worried about the allegations database that she set up, which we will look at very closely in our next report. I have many constituents who complain that they are being abused by their spouses and have been tricked into getting married. They make their complaint to the Home Office and nothing happens. They are not informed because of the bizarre belief that they are third parties. I do not believe that someone who goes off to a foreign country and marries somebody there, and then brings them to this country so that they are only here because they brought them in, and who then complains that their spouse has abused the system and tricked them, is a third party. Of course they need to know whether the Home Office has removed them. We have had 28,000 allegations since the Prime Minister’s famous speech in London two years ago, when he asked people to report these issues, and 500 arrests have been made, but still the Home Office cannot tell us how many people have been removed.

I have three final points, and I shall begin with the College of Policing. I know that the Home Secretary is not interested in legacy stuff, because I am sure she will be in post for a long time, but when her legacy is written up, the creation of the College of Policing—which I hope will be called the “Royal College of Policing”, as that will give an impetus and dignity to those we train as police officers—will be seen as an important feature of her new landscape for policing. However, she ought to have ensured that the chair of the college appointed the members of the board or had a part to play in that, rather than appointing all the members of the board and then appointing the chair. I know she had problems filling that post but they have been resolved, and she has now appointed an excellent chair. In order to give the chair greater importance, the chair could perhaps be allowed to work with board members to co-opt additional people on to the board, which is not doing very well in terms of diversity.

I attended the Emily Wilding Davison centenary celebrations with the Home Secretary and you, Mr Speaker, and I heard what the Home Secretary said about diversity. In fact, I think I may even have got one of the T-shirts that were on offer. Diversity is not an apparent feature of the College of Policing board, however. Moreover, I find it extraordinary that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who represents so many police officers, does not sit on the board, whereas the Association of Chief Police Officers does. I have nothing against that organisation sitting on the board, but the commissioner should, too.

The Home Secretary still has not told us who will hold the integrity register for chief constables. She rightly announced that chief constables ought to have a register of gifts they receive and jobs they do, but after all these months she has still not told us where that register is going to sit. In her new landscape, she has so many new organisations to choose from, and one of them—perhaps the College of Policing, perhaps Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary—needs to hold the register in order to give it credibility. Although the Home Secretary did not like the idea of a register for police and crime commissioners, the Select Committee published one. PCCs were very upset, but the fact is we just published what they put on their websites or what they told us to put in. If we have registers for MPs, peers and chief constables, we should have one for PCCs. We must not leave that until the next election.

The Home Secretary seemed a little puzzled about the cost of the certificate of knowledge in policing, or perhaps she was saying that is up to the College of Policing. We should, however, look carefully at the cost of a certificate, which is £1,000.

On the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the Home Secretary has done everything we could have asked her to do in respect of our last report on that organisation. She did not quite deal with the point made by the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), however.

[Mrs May]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for mentioning the IPCC, because it enables me, if he will indulge me in this, to deal with the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood). I have checked, and in cases of suspected criminality the extension of the IPCC oversight of private sector contractors will allow them to be interviewed under caution. I am grateful for the opportunity to put that on the record.

[Keith Vaz]

I am delighted that the Home Secretary has got that on the record, and I know that the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon will also be very pleased.

The Committee said that the IPCC was woefully under-equipped and hamstrung by a lack of powers and resources. The Home Secretary has not given it all the powers we would have wanted, but she has certainly given it a lot of them. She does need to deal with the issue or resources, however. People tend to refer conduct issues to the IPCC. It is dealing with thousands of cases as a result of Hillsborough. It has an excellent new chair in Dame Anne Owers, and it has shown a real commitment to do good work in this area, but it cannot do that work unless it has the necessary resources to finish the job. We thank the Home Secretary for giving these powers, but we also say, “Let’s have the resources to go with them.”

Finally, on extradition, we again have what the Select Committee recommended in our report on the subject. The forum bar has been enacted, and this will take it further. We need to stop having cases such as those involving Gary McKinnon and Richard O’Dwyer, which I know took up a huge amount of the Home Secretary’s time and the time of this House. I still think it should be up to the Home Secretary to make that decision, rather than give it to judges, because I think there are other considerations to take into account. I do not think that she or her successor if Labour wins the next election, the current shadow Home Secretary, are very keen to have the power to stop people’s extradition, but she is the Home Secretary and she should be making these decisions, not a judge. That question is for another day, however.

In the end, we have a Bill that enacts a lot of what the Select Committee has recommended over the years. I think we need to improve parts of it, as the shadow Home Secretary has said, but I am glad we are not pressing the House to a Division on this important measure this evening.

Student Visas

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Thursday 6th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes the recommendations of the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, the Home Affairs Select Committee, and the Committee of Public Accounts, together with the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee and the EU Sub-Committee on Home Affairs, Health and Education, for the removal of students from net migration targets; and invites the Home Office to further consider the conclusions of these Committees in developing its immigration policy.

I thank the Back-Bench Business Committee for allocating time for this important debate. I am grateful to those Members who helped me get this Back-Bench business debate: my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), who is not only a fellow Select Committee member, but secretary of the all-party higher education group, whom I thank for the work that he has done, and the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), whom I thank for the assiduous way in which he has backed the Select Committee recommendations and worked to ensure that they get wider recognition.

The motion demonstrates that there have been five Select Committee reports on this subject. All have examined the student visas issue, all have come to similar conclusions and all have been consistently rejected by the Home Office, even though a considerable number of Government Members on the relevant Select Committees have backed those reports. However, the wording of the motion is deliberately designed not to pursue a confrontational approach with the Home Office, and I will not seek to divide the House on the motion. Rather, the motion has been tabled in order to give the House an opportunity to present a case for removing students from the net migration figures in a way that will be evidence-led and lead to further consideration in the evolution and, I hope, refinement of the Government’s immigration policies.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Bailey]

Yes, I could not resist the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I congratulate him on securing the debate and accurately reflecting the views of the Home Affairs Committee.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the way we conduct this debate—the language that we use—is extremely important? Over the past year, in the case of India, for example, there has been a 30% decline in the number of students coming to this country because the message has got out that they are not welcome here. Our message is that they are welcome here, and we need to reflect this in the debate that we have and in Government policy.

[Mr Bailey]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. It is not just the regulatory regime, but the language surrounding the introduction and implementation of that regulatory regime, which define international perception of our policy. I will touch on that in the course of my remarks.

Drugs

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Thursday 6th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bayley, in this important debate. I am pleased to see the Minister here, as well as the colleagues from the Select Committee on Home Affairs who said that they would come. I pay tribute to those Committee members who participated in drafting and agreeing the report: the hon. Members for Northampton North (Michael Ellis), for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) and for South Ribble (Lorraine Fullbrook), my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) and for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) and the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless). In particular, I commend the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) and our colleague the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon, who first pressed for the inquiry. The hon. Member for Cambridge is in his place. Like me, he is torn between two debates in the House on home affairs. We are occupying the time of Home Office Ministers in both Westminster Hall and the main Chamber: gladly, not the same Minister. I am also grateful to Committee staff, particularly the specialist Ellie Scarnell, for all their hard work.

The Committee’s report, published on 3 December 2012, is entitled “Breaking the Cycle”. It is our first report on drugs for more than a decade; the last time we considered the issue, in 2002, a young Member of the House, the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron), was on the Committee, which should give other Committee members heart that they have a great political future ahead of them. We spent a year looking in depth at drug education, prevention and treatment for drug addiction, at reducing the supply of drugs in both the United Kingdom and abroad and at the evidence on which drugs policy was based. We visited two countries: Colombia, where we travelled into the jungle to see where cocaine is produced, and Portugal, to examine the drug laws there. We had nearly 200 evidence submissions and 48 conclusions and recommendations. We heard views from people as diverse as Sir Richard Branson, Russell Brand and Peter Oborne. The ex-president of Switzerland, Ruth Dreifuss, also gave evidence to the Committee.

This debate, for which we canvassed so many people’s support, is current. Just today, there was a letter in The Times calling for an independent review of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, signed by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) as the former leader of the Green party, Professor David Nutt, Sting and many others, including the hon. Member for Cambridge and myself. Public response to the report has been overwhelming. Society cares deeply about the issue, because it affects us all and the costs are borne by each and every one of us. In the United Kingdom alone, drug addicts commit between one third and one half of all acquisitive crime, and drugs cost our health and justice system £15.3 billion a year.

The debate following the report’s publication caused great excitement in the press. The Mail on Sunday front page read:

“MPs pave way to legalise drugs”.

The front page of the more sober Guardian said that MPs were calling for

“a royal commission on failing drugs laws”.

It has become a feature of reports by the Home Affairs Committee and other Committees that we do not just make recommendations; we also monitor them to see whether they have been implemented. I call it our traffic light report. Each recommendation is awarded a colour: red when the Government have done nothing about it, yellow when they are moving in the right direction and green if the recommendation has been accepted. After all—you will know this, Mr Bayley, from your distinguished service on Select Committees —there is no point in having a Select Committee inquiry, going into a subject in depth and providing recommendations if nobody wants to implement them.

I am pleased to say that the Government have accepted or partially accepted just under 50% of the conclusions and recommendations in our drugs report. That is not as much as in other reports, but they are moving in the right direction. It was, however, disappointing that they rejected our main recommendation calling for a royal commission, although I warmly welcome the Deputy Prime Minister’s support for it.

I am delighted that the Minister of State, Home Department, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne), who is here today, is following our recommendations and considering drugs policies abroad, visiting countries such as Denmark and Sweden. In particular, I am glad that he is considering visiting Portugal, or may have done so already; we will hear his travel plans and where he has been in his speech. We visited Portugal, as I have said, and saw at first hand what the Portuguese are doing. I hope that when he went to Portugal he met, or that if he goes to Portugal he will meet, Dr Fernando Leal da Costa, the Portuguese Health Minister, who was kind enough to attend our drugs conference in September and give the 200-plus attendees a fascinating insight into the impact of their policies.

We decided to call our report “Breaking the Cycle” because we identified a number of critical intervention points where, if the right action is taken, the devastating cycle of drug addiction can be broken. The first critical intervention point is during childhood. Prevention is better than cure, and the education system has a vital role to play in ensuring that children and young people resist peer pressure and understand the risks involved in taking drugs. We found that drugs education provision was patchy. The Department for Education noted that most primary and secondary schools provide it once a year at most. A number of our witnesses were highly critical of the quality of awareness provided in the education system. In some cases, they believed that it was likely to inspire children to take drugs rather than the opposite.

The Government have now told us that education will be their focus in the third year of the drugs strategy. In our view, we cannot wait three years for a resolution to the issue. This is the earliest possible chance to break the cycle of drug addiction, and we cannot squander it. Local authorities are being left to decide and fund the most appropriate way of educating children about the dangers of drugs. As focus rightly moves from enforcement for possession to tackling supply and demand, it is vital that our children are aware that there are more risks to drug taking than just being arrested.

Another critical intervention point is recovery from addiction. In 2011-12, some 96,070 people were given a prescription for a substitute drug as a method of treatment. Another 30,000 people were given a prescription and some sort of counselling. Only 1,100 people were in residential rehabilitation.

If the Government are serious about their policy of recovery, they must improve the quality and range of treatments available. There is an over-reliance on prescription treatment, and no recognition of the importance of also treating the psychological symptoms of addiction. Each individual needs a treatment plan tailored to their needs. Intensive treatment is more expensive in the short term, but if it breaks the cycle of drug addiction, the long-term benefits to society are enormous and the cost to society is greatly reduced.

Treatments that we know work, such as residential rehabilitation and buprenorphine as an alternative to methadone, are under-utilised. In 2011, more than 400 deaths were related to methadone. Treatment must also be supplemented by housing, training and employment support, if required, because the end goal of recovery is integration into society. A league table of treatment centre performance should be established so that patients do not waste time and money on care that is not up to scratch. The Department of Health and the Home Office should lead jointly on drugs to ensure that the focus on recovery is maintained. If we reduce demand, we automatically reduce supply.

Many groups are working hard to bring such matters to the Government’s attention, and we met some of them during our inquiry. I want to commend the work being done by Mitch Winehouse, and the living memorial that he has set up to his daughter Amy. He has been one of the most vocal and articulate voices about the provision of rehabilitation support to so many people.

Prison is another critical intervention point. Tackling drug addiction, as the Secretary of State for Justice has said, is vital to the prevention of costly reoffending. Some 29% of prisoners reported having a drug problem when they arrived in prison, 6% developed a drug problem after having arrived and 24% reported that it was easy or very easy to get drugs there. Last year, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick, reported an increase in the number of people in prison with prescription drug addiction.

The Committee visited Her Majesty’s Prisons Brixton and Holloway, and we were impressed by their voluntary testing schemes, which were having a real impact on addiction. I want to thank the governors of Brixton, Edmond Tullett, and of Holloway, Julia Killick, for helping to make that happen. We were, however, concerned that funding for such schemes was under threat.

I welcome the Justice Secretary’s commitment to a rehabilitation revolution, with inmates being met at the prison gates to be given support. To identify those who need rehabilitation, we need compulsory testing on entry to and exit from prison, including for the use of prescription drugs. We must also ensure that the voluntary sector, with its valuable experience, has a chance to win rehabilitation contracts against large procurement companies such as G4S that are cheaper but, frankly, just do not have the expertise.

The Committee’s visit to Miami alerted us to the epidemic scale of prescription drug addiction in the United States. More than half of American drug addicts are prescription drug addicts. It is difficult to measure the exact scale of the problem in the UK, because treatment is by general practitioners and is not treated as drug addiction. However, valuable reports by newspapers such as The Times highlight that it is a ticking time bomb in British society that we are doing very little to address. It is a problem not just in our prisons, but right across the country.

I was pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), who has responsibility for public health, highlighted her concerns about the abuse of prescription medication several months ago. I hope that the Government will heed the Committee’s warning and push the issue up their agenda as a matter of urgency. In Miami, we heard about the first prosecution of a doctor for giving out multiple prescription drugs. People sometimes say that if we look at America, we see what might very well happen in Europe: it is on an epidemic scale, and I urge the Government to consider that very carefully.

If prescription drugs are a powder keg awaiting a spark, legal highs have already exploded. In 2012, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction identified 73 new drugs in Europe, which is 10 times the number of new substances identified in 2006. A survey on the drug use of 15 to 24-year-olds found that 8% of them had taken a legal high.

The drugs market is changing, and as well as warning our children of the dangers of heroin, cocaine and ecstasy, we need to worry about the creation of a culture in which people can order so many legal highs for next-day delivery through the internet. The Government have introduced temporary banning orders, but just last month Maryon Stewart, who gave evidence to our inquiry, found legal highs on sale on Amazon. There are 200 different substances that are not covered by our drug laws, and we do not know the dangers of those psychoactive substances because, clearly, we have not tried them. Temporary banning orders work, and once a substance has been banned it can no longer be used, but what are the Government doing about the five substances that are created for every one that is banned?

New Zealand is introducing a law to regulate such substances, under which the requirement to prove that the drugs are safe is a duty on the manufacturer. I do not want to extend the Minister’s travel plans, because I know how much he likes staying in his constituency, having been a Foreign Office Minister and gone all over the world, as he did so assiduously, but we should look at what New Zealand is doing. I am suggesting not that he needs to go there, but that he engage with what New Zealand Ministers have done, because we should adopt such good practice in future. I urge the Government to follow our recommendation to make retailers liable for the harms caused by untested psychoactive substances that they have sold. Just as a garage would be responsible for a crash involving a faulty car, legal high sellers should be accountable for the effects of their products.

The cost of ineffective drugs policy reaches far wider than the United Kingdom. During the Committee’s visit to Colombia, we witnessed how the devastating impact of drugs extends far beyond the addict. In 2010, coca was cultivated on 149,100 hectares in Andean countries—an area roughly one and a half times the size of Hong Kong—that cannot afford to fight the drugs war on their own. The value of the global cocaine market is £543 billion, while Bolivia’s national budget, for example, is just £1.69 billion. Despite damage to their land, farmers receive only 1% of the revenue from global cocaine sales. When the Committee met the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, he asked us why his policemen, his judges and his citizens should die in the war on drugs when members of the British public were the ones who wanted to use those drugs. The responsibility lies with us.

I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to President Santos and his soldiers and police officers who, day after day, die protecting us from the scourge of cocaine. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude. I shall be meeting him this afternoon as he is in London and I will again convey the thanks of our country. I also want to thank the Colombian ambassador to the United Kingdom, His Excellency Ambassador Rodriguez, for his assistance with our visit to Colombia and for keeping us informed with a regular dialogue.

Some 85% of profits are earned by distributors of drugs in the United States or Europe, and the United Nations estimates that global drugs profits stand at £380 billion, the vast majority of which ends up in our financial system. Antonio Maria Costa, the former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, has said:

“I cannot think of one bank in the world that has not been penetrated by mafia money.”

Banks with British bases, such as Coutts and HSBC, have been found guilty of laundering drugs money, yet there have been no individual prosecutions, just fines, which are basically a drop in the ocean for multinational banks. Those companies need to hear the rattling of handcuffs in their boardrooms. We must bring forward new legislation to extend the personal criminal liability of those who hold senior positions in our banks and who have been found wanting for not dealing with money laundering.

The Financial Services Authority did not come up to scratch on that issue, as it ignored almost $380 billion of money laundered by the drug cartels and dealers. I hope—I look to the Minister for assurance on this matter—that the new Financial Conduct Authority will be much tougher than the FSA, because we were not overly convinced by the FSA’s work.

After a year scrutinising UK drugs policy, it was clear to the Committee that many aspects of our current drugs policy were simply not working and needed to be reviewed. When the then Lord Chancellor, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), gave evidence to the Committee, he told us that the war on drugs had failed. The Prison Governors Association also recently said that we needed to rethink our approach to drugs. We are not dealing with the dealers or focusing on the users. Drugs still cost thousands of lives and billions of pounds each year.

People are already describing Guinea-Bissau as the world’s first narco-state. That is why we felt that, even after a year’s inquiry, the visits that we made and the evidence that we took, it was vital that the Government established a royal commission. We felt that the best way forward was to bring all the people with great expertise, including those who have been affected by drugs, before a royal commission headed by a High Court judge so that we can study in huge depth this subject that even we, after a year, have not got to the bottom of.

I urge the Minister to reconsider our proposal on a royal commission. I think that he supports the idea of one, but the problem is with other parts of the coalition Government. It is the policy of his party and his leader, the Deputy Prime Minister, to support a royal commission, and it is a policy that has been advocated by the hon. Member for Cambridge. I cannot remember the quote of the Deputy Prime Minister, but he once lavishly praised the hon. Gentleman, saying that as far as he was concerned, on certain aspects of policy, what the hon. Member for Cambridge said went. I hope very much that the royal commission can be established and that the Government will look at all aspects of drugs policy, so that there is a proper debate. We do not want a situation in which politicians run away as soon as the word “drugs” is mentioned and everyone hides under the table. We want a proper and open discussion, as I had in Leicester. I asked the Leicester Mercury to conduct a citizens’ poll to tell me what the people felt about the matter. I pay tribute to the Leicester Mercury and all the other local papers that were part of that debate. Let the people decide; let them put forward their views to a royal commission. I believe that that is the proper way forward.

To those who say that a royal commission could last forever, let me say that we thought about that, which is why we suggested that it should have an end date of 2015—that magic year in the history of our country when all things will change and all things will become visible. This matter is a great challenge for us and for our generation of politicians and I hope that we will rise to it.

[Hugh Bayley (in the Chair)]

I think that the Chamber should hear from the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert).

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bayley, and to follow the Chair of the Select Committee, especially after his kind words. I am not sure that they were entirely accurate. I think that he was referring to the draft Communications Data Bill, which he and I and various others have discussed in the past.

I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee on having the courage to ensure that the Committee considered this issue, because it is so sensitive and can lead to a huge amount of concern in some parts of the press. I also congratulate him on his leadership and on his speech, which took much of the content out of what I was planning to say, so I will only focus on a few key issues. There is a huge amount in this very thick and detailed report, and I support it completely.

I want to begin with the basic principles of how we start to work. First and fairly obviously, drugs are harmful. They are harmful whether they are legal or illegal; whether they are cocaine, marijuana, paracetamol or one of the new legal highs. They all have harms, and many of them also have benefits. As we say in one of the key parts of the report, the question is how we deal with those harms. Paragraph 14 of the report states:

“Drug use can lead to harm in a variety of ways: to the individual who is consuming the drug; to other people who are close to the user; through acquisitive and organised crime, and wider harm to society at large. The drugs trade is the most lucrative form of crime, affecting most countries, if not every country in the world.”

The principal aim of the Government drugs policy should be first and foremost to minimise those harms, but how do we go about doing that? How do we reduce the harms from alcohol and heroin and the harms from prescription drugs, which can be abused? For more than 40 years now, the answer has principally been to separate drugs into a category of legal or illegal—I use the term loosely of course because the drug itself cannot be legal or illegal, but possession can be. For the illegal ones, we have focused principally on the criminal justice approach—policing, courts, prisons and all the sanctions of the Home Office.

When the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was passed—interestingly, it has never been reviewed since 1971—the debate was all about how it would lead to the end of the use of illegal drugs. That was the Act’s aim. It certainly has not worked in that respect. If we were in a world now where no one had any of the drugs for which possession was illegal, we would be having a very different debate.

The Act simply has not worked, and that has been very expensive. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction has estimated that 0.48% of the UK’s GDP is spent on our overall drugs strategy. I think that that is the highest rate of expenditure in Europe, and yet for many drugs, we have among the highest rates of use in Europe. We are spending lots of money, but there is lots of drug use—the Act is just not working.

In the process, we have hit many people’s lives. We have left people to languish in jail for a long time. Also, we have made people who possess small amounts of drugs go to jail, and many of them suffer problems trying to live and work afterwards. Even a caution for the most minor offences can still affect people’s ability to live and work. So we need to change things.

I have heard it said—there is some basis for saying it—that drug use is currently down. However, that is only true when looking at the drugs that we have made illegal. What we know—as the Chair of the Select Committee highlighted—is that there are now many other new psychoactive substances that people are moving to because of the pressure that we are putting on for legal reasons. We have no idea whether encouraging people to stop taking marijuana and to start taking one of the new things that they can find legally online somewhere is better or worse for them. We have no idea whether the harms caused by the other drugs will be better or worse. So we may well be pushing people to things that are far worse than the things that we are trying to clamp down on.

We also have to look at this issue in the round. We have to look at the pressures of alcohol. I asked one of the police officers who gave evidence if his officers would rather face, at the end of an evening, a group of four men who were drunk or a group of four men who were stoned. Most police officers would far rather deal with the people who had used marijuana. We have to look at the impacts of some of these other issues.

As the Chairman of the Select Committee quite rightly said, one of the key things that we say is that we need to look again at this issue. These days, we do not allow legislation to sit by for 40 years without looking at it; we try to have post-legislative scrutiny to see whether a law is working and doing what it is supposed to do. That is why the Select Committee has called for a royal commission to look at the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. That is what our report says, and we are not the only people saying it by any stretch of the imagination.

The UK Drug Policy Consortium has done six years of work on the issue and it has called for many of the same things that we have called for; I commend all its detailed publications. Huge numbers of organisations say what our report says; I could mention many of them, such as Transform and Release. Also, we are increasingly getting senior people who have had experience of this fight, including senior people from MI5, MI6 and the police, who say, “No. We’re not doing it the right way. We have to change.” In Cambridgeshire, Tom Lloyd, the former chief constable, who has huge experience of dealing with the criminal justice approach to drugs, is very clear—indeed, categorical—that we need to change.

Our Committee has not gone as far as some suggest. The Chair of our Committee referred to the article in The Mail on Sunday, which suggested that we support full legalisation, but that is not what we recommended. However, we supported a proposal that was made more than 10 years ago by the Home Affairs Committee and supported by the Prime Minister, as he is now. That proposal was very clear, and the Prime Minister voted in favour of a proposal that we also endorse. It is that

“we recommend that the Government initiate a discussion within the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of alternative ways—including the possibility of legalisation and regulation—to tackle the global drugs dilemma.”

That is what the Prime Minister said 10 years ago. The key thing in that recommendation is that not only legalisation should at least be considered; we also have to regulate. That may or may not be the right answer, which is why we need a royal commission.

Our Committee called for a royal commission and we published this detailed, thick report. I was impressed that, within only an hour or so of its being published, the Home Secretary was able to say no, nothing in the report was new and that people did not need to learn from it. That was an impressively fast response. I commend my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister for the work that he has been doing on this issue. There have been some positive things, and the full Government response was rather more positive than the initial comment that came out from the Home Office.

The Chair of our Committee described the Government response as supporting about half of our recommendations. In a number of cases, the suggestion from the Government was that what we were recommending was already being done. We could argue about the extent to which that is true, but my summary is that the Government response was largely saying no to most of our new suggestions.

However, I strongly welcome two things in the Government response to our report, because I think that they will make the difference. Again, I strongly commend my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister for his work to get them into the Government response. One of them is set out at the top of page 15, where an interesting sentence says:

“High quality drug treatment is the most effective way of reducing drug misuse and reducing drug related mortality.”

I agree completely with that. To start off by putting treatment as the principal aim rather than the criminal justice focus is exactly what many of us have been arguing for. We now need the Government to follow through on their own statement that we need to focus on the “high quality drug treatment” and not on the policing or the criminal justice. That fits with our recommendation that we need to get the Department of Health far more involved.

With the greatest of respect to my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister, having a Drugs Minister based in the Home Office means that the starting point will always be the criminal justice-led approach. There is co-operation and working with the Department of Health, but many other countries have the lead for drugs policy based in their departments of health—or their equivalent—because the focus needs to be on treatment, as the Government here have now accepted.

The other key thing that came out of the Government response was the international comparators study. I was very pleased to see that. During our evidence sessions, it was clear that although there was a stated commitment, in the words of the Drugs Strategy 2010,

“to review new evidence on what works in other countries and what we can learn from it”,

that commitment was being honoured—certainly at ministerial level—in a slightly more relaxed way than perhaps some of us might have liked. It is absolutely right that we should proactively look at other countries to see what they achieve.

My hon. Friend the Minister has been to Portugal already, and I am sure that he will talk a bit later about what he saw there. When our Committee went to Portugal, we saw a few things that were really striking. The Portuguese model is often misdescribed. In Portugal, it is still an offence to possess large amounts of any drug and it is still a criminal offence to supply drugs. The key difference is that possession of a relatively small amount of any drug—up to 10 days’ personal supply, and there are estimated figures for what that amount is—is treated outside the criminal justice system. There are dissuasion commissions that deal with those cases in a non-judicial way; there is no criminal sanction and the focus is on treatment. The aim is to have individualised care, to make sure that people can get out of using drugs.

We were impressed by how fast people could be set up with treatment in Portugal. There are often delays in the UK in trying to find appropriate treatment facilities. In Portugal, people said that it was very frustrating that sometimes they would have to wait for two days, which would be amazingly fast for many of the people in my constituency who I have spoken to. So Portugal has this process whereby people who are addicts are pushed towards treatment. There are other ways that they can be dealt with, but none of them involves dealing with the criminal justice process and none of them affects people’s ability to work, except in a very few special circumstances.

The Portuguese approach was controversial when it was established but it seems to have worked, and there are a number of ways to look at it. According to the official Portuguese figures, the number of long-term addicts has declined from more than 100,000 people before the new policy was enacted, which was about 10 years ago, to half that number today. The Portuguese have also found less drug use in prison.

What was striking when we went to Portugal and spoke to politicians from across the political range—from the Christian democrats on the right to the communists on the far left—was that none of them disagreed with the policy. With the Christian democrats, we had an interesting meeting with a very impressive woman from the party who had opposed the policy when it was introduced. The Christian democrats had made all sorts of dire predictions about what would happen—the sort of thing that we can read in The Daily Mail—but they said, “We were wrong. We didn’t see increased drug use, which we were concerned about; we didn’t see drug tourism; we didn’t see any of the problems.”

The live debate in Portugal around drugs policy is whether treatment should be funded on a national or regional basis. That was the debate across the political spectrum. Nobody was questioning whether the decriminalisation of possession of small amounts was the right thing or wrong thing to do. The hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison), who was leading us on that occasion, made a point of asking everybody whether they agreed in principle with the policy. Not a single person disagreed; we could not find anybody who did so. We spoke to the police, who had originally opposed it, and they said, “Actually, this has been better for us for policing. We don’t have to spend so much time on people who are addicts, who are small users. Instead, they can help us to deal with the people who are dealing, who are causing the higher-level problems with gangs and organised crime.” Nobody opposed the policy.

We met a gentleman who leads a non-governmental organisation that is staunchly anti liberalising the drugs policy—it was the closest we came to meeting somebody who disagreed—and he said that 10 days’ supply was too much and that it should be more like two or three days’ supply. I explained that that would be seen as phenomenally liberal in this country, and he was shocked. They all agree that that is not the right way to go. I hope the Minister found things much the same in Portugal—I am sure he will speak for himself—and that there was a strong sense that the policy worked well.

The principle of focusing on not criminalising people in possession has already been accepted by the Government in a different context: temporary class drug orders, brought in a couple of years ago to allow the temporary ban on drugs while we are trying to find all the evidence. The Government have made it an offence to supply large amounts of such drugs, but not an offence to possess small amounts. All I am suggesting is that we apply the same principle to other drugs, because it has been found to work in Portugal, to be publicly accepted and to have good outcomes.

I am keen on an evidence base. There is a fantastic piece of evidence from the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic used to have no criminal sanction on possession of small amounts, but in 2001 it changed the law and criminalised possession, and there was a big debate. The sort of arguments were made that might be expected, with people saying that if possession were criminalised fewer people would use drugs, people would be healthier and better, and there would be less drug use—all of that sort of thing. The Government there did something that Governments rarely do and set out their hypotheses, worked out how to measure and test them, and published a proper impact analysis, internationally verified, of their predictions. They found that they did not get what they expected from criminalising possession.

The implementation of a penalty for possession of illicit drugs for personal use did not meet any of the tested objectives, was loss-making from an economic point of view and brought about avoidable social costs. It was found that criminalisation made things worse. That suggests that decriminalisation—not an absolute parallel, but as close as one can get—would not be likely to make things bad.

The summary of results in the Czech impact analysis states that

“from the perspective of social costs, enforcement of penalizing of possession of illicit drugs for personal use is disadvantageous”.

The hypothesis that availability of illicit drugs would decrease was rejected, as was the one suggesting that the number of illicit drug users would decrease; and rather than the number of new cases of illicit drug use decreasing after criminalisation, incidence in the general population increased. Rather than finding no negative health indicators relating to illicit drug use, there were more fatal overdoses from illicit drugs after criminalisation, and the hypothesis that social costs would not increase was rejected. Having done this study, the Czech Republic went back and decriminalised possession, because it found that it was better for its society and was cheaper and more effective at dealing with drugs. We can do this in this country.

Of course, no country is a perfect model, but we know that in Portugal decriminalisation of possession of small amounts works and has societal benefits and is well accepted, and that in the Czech Republic it is better to decriminalise possession than not to. We can try that here. We would need a royal commission to work out the exact details of how to do the work here. We can make a difference.

Although I would love to talk about other domestic issues, I do not have time to go through them in perfect detail. The focus on treatment is right. I am alarmed that there is a push to suggest that abstinence is the only form of treatment that really counts. Where people are having treatment, we want to move them from high usage to lower usage. For some people that will mean abstinence and for others it will mean maintenance. We want to offer them the choice of whatever will get them to the lowest level we can. The Chair of our Committee was right in what he said about prisons and the need to get smaller providers involved in drugs treatment.

I want to pick up on an issue, drug-driving, that plays into Home Office discussions. It is right to have a criminal offence for drug-driving, just as there is for drink-driving, and the threshold for harm should be the same. We allow drivers to drink up to 0.08 mg per ml, and we should allow the same equivalent harm from drug use. For someone whose drug use has taken them to that risk level, that should be the key test. We make that recommendation in our report in paragraph 2:

“the equivalent effect on safety as the legal alcohol limit, currently 0.08 mg/ml.”

We must ensure that we get health further involved.

Let me finish by mentioning supply, because drugs are not just a UK problem but a huge international problem. Although we have had 50 years of criminalisation, illicit drugs are now the third most valuable industry in the world, after food and oil. That is incredibly damaging. We tracked the routes for cocaine, as our Committee Chair said. We went to Colombia to see where it was grown; to Florida, where we saw how the US military tried to combat it; and we saw the customs’ efforts to try to stop it flooding into the US. I spoke to parliamentarians from west Africa, looking at that stage of the process. In Portugal, cocaine is coming into Europe. The message at every stage was clear: supply cannot be stopped. It can be squeezed in various ways. For example, massive military efforts can be made in Colombia to reduce the amount of coca plantation, but it moves to a neighbouring country. Interdiction can used and the navy can block one side of central America, but it goes to the other side or takes an air route.

It was astonishing to see the mini-submarines now being created by the Colombian drugs lords, which cost about $1 million and have a range that allows them to reach London. The cocaine loaded on to those can be sold for about $500,000. The US navy was clear: with the best will in the world, it cannot spot a small submarine somewhere in the Atlantic. Supply cannot be controlled.

[Keith Vaz]

It is more astonishing that it was cost-effective for the drugs barons to sink the submarine when it arrived in Africa, because their profits were so enormous that they could just buy another one.

[Dr Huppert]

The right hon. Gentleman is right. I was flabbergasted to find out just how much money was involved. I was even more surprised to discover that, in Portugal, where there has been a problem for a while with people flying drugs in from west Africa—they have tried to combat that—drugs are now being flown back from Portugal into west Africa. On asking, we were told, “We think it is because the drugs are returned to the sender if they are not of good enough quality.” If people think it is safe enough to transfer drugs internationally that they can have a returns policy, we are nowhere near stopping supply, and in the process we are losing control of country after country to the drugs cartels. The profits are huge, and criminal gangs and cartels across the world thrive on them. The banks have a huge part to play, as the right hon. Gentleman was right to highlight. This is wrecking many countries. We did not look at the situation with heroin and marijuana, but the same damaging effects apply in different countries.

President Santos has been taking a strong stance, saying that his country will try to control this problem; but we cannot expect countries to be torn apart for ever in an effort to control a problem that cannot be controlled. I am delighted that, in 2016, the United Nations General Assembly will have a special session to look again at its international drugs policy. I hope that, whatever flavour of Government we have then, we will be working with people like President Santos and with the reformers to try to solve this global problem.

We have worked for 40 years with a criminalisation process that has not delivered what we said it should deliver in 1971. It has not worked for the users of drugs, for society at large or for the Treasury. There are much better ways.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Bayley. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I apologise, but I have a very sore throat, so my voice is not quite as it should be. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert). I will certainly look to his pronouncements in future for an indication of Liberal Democrat policy.

I start by recognising that the report is an important piece of work. I pay tribute to the leadership of the Select Committee’s Chair, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz). I also pay tribute to all the members of the Committee who contributed to the report, which draws upon the huge experience of different people and organisations. As we have heard, many different countries have been considered.

I had an opportunity to listen to some of the witness sessions. I heard Sir Richard Branson and Russell Brand give evidence, and I attended the Committee’s one-day conference in Parliament. I think it was very useful to invite the general public in to hear the deliberations of that Committee.

I visited Colombia after the Select Committee’s visit, and I know from my conversations with the Serious Organised Crime Agency officers based in Colombia that they were delighted to be able to explain the international role they play in addressing the drugs problem. They do some very important work, which I am pleased has been recognised in the report.

The report is wide-ranging and contains many recommendations. Because of the time, I will go through some of the recommendations that I believe are key. I look to the Minister to answer some of my questions on the approach the Government will take to addressing the Committee’s recommendations.

I start with the recommendation that the lead for drugs policy should be shared between the Home Office and the Department of Health, with a designated point person co-ordinating policy. That might seem an unlikely place to start, but I think it is absolutely essential that drugs policy is co-ordinated across Departments. I will address that theme in the points I raise this afternoon. The Opposition recognise the importance of a co-ordinated approach, and it is certainly important to recognise that there has been a high level of cross-departmental work on drugs over the past 10 years.

The Minister, although based in the Home Office, is responding on behalf of the Government, and I know he takes seriously his responsibilities on drugs. I question whether it should be necessary for two Departments to be involved with drugs, because the Minister is able today to discuss aspects of the drugs strategy that sit not only within the Home Office but within the Department for Education and other bodies, such as Public Health England and the NHS.

That leads me to the report’s recommendation on the need to strengthen and open up the inter-ministerial group on drugs, which the Minister chairs. One of the recommendations is that the group’s minutes, agendas and attendance lists should be published. I have spent much of the past 18 months trying to get details of those minutes, agendas and attendance lists through parliamentary questions, and I have resorted to freedom of information requests. I have been continually thwarted by the Home Office, so I think that recommendation would help us to understand and appreciate what is happening across Government.

We can see the importance of cross-Government working when we look at the record of achievement over the past 10 years on reducing the health harms of drug use, particularly heroin and crack cocaine use. All the key indicators are improving, and some of them have already been mentioned.

The number of drug users is falling, particularly among the 16-to-24 age group, although, as the hon. Member for Cambridge highlighted, that may not give us a true picture if we take legal highs into account. The number of drug deaths has fallen even more sharply—more than halving between 2001 and 2011—partly because we have had much better access to treatment and because treatment is more successful. The average waiting time to access treatment was nine weeks in 2001; it was five days in 2011, and it is getting more effective. Only 27% of treatment programmes were successful in 2005, but the figure rose to 41% in 2011.

Finally, and probably most importantly, more people are completing treatment. In 2005, 37,000 people dropped out of treatment before completion, whereas only 11,000 completed it. By 2011, those figures had almost reversed: 17,000 people dropped out of treatment, whereas nearly 30,000 completed it. I am sure we could see further improvement, and I am not complacent at all, but we ought to recognise that there has been huge improvement in treatment outcomes over the past 10 years. I say that in particular because much of what has been achieved was within the framework of collaboration.

The National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse was set up as a joint Home Office and Department of Health project to ensure that drugs treatment had the required priority in the NHS. Although the NTA was funded by the NHS, the Home Office had representation on its board because there was clear acceptance that the Home Office had a key part to play. We knew that drug treatment was important in reducing crime. We wanted to ensure that those two parts, treatment and crime prevention, sat together. I think the NTA was an unprecedented success, and I pay tribute to the recently retired chief executive, Paul Hayes, who did an excellent job over many years.

I saw at first hand how collaboration can work effectively when I visited a drugs treatment facility in Wakefield run by Turning Point. In one building there were police officers, probation officers, social workers and a range of medics and support officers, which works very well, but I share the Committee’s concerns about how such a set-up will fare in the new frameworks. Such facilities will depend on the co-operation of the new police and crime commissioners, who will have some responsibility for funding, and the new health and wellbeing boards. In the case of the facility that I visited, the PCC will have to liaise with nine different health and wellbeing boards, each of which has a huge number of priorities. We need to keep an eye on how well such facilities continue to be funded under those new PCCs and health and wellbeing boards.

I am also concerned about the level of co-ordination between health and wellbeing boards and the criminal justice system. I am pleased that in my home city of Hull the police have been co-opted on to the health and wellbeing board, but I do not think that is the norm. I support the Committee’s recommendation that more information be collected from health and wellbeing boards on where their money is being spent and who is involved in that decision making. The Home Office should ensure that that includes information on co-ordination with criminal justice partners. Drug treatment is not sexy, but for it to keep working a huge number of local politicians will have to continue to prioritise drug treatment and the spending that it needs. I question whether, in the financing regime they have set up, the Government have put enough in place to incentivise local politicians to recognise that.

Quite rightly, much of the Committee’s report addresses how we can improve treatment and increase recovery rates, and I particularly want to mention prisons. The Committee makes a number of recommendations about improving provision in prisons, and that seems sensible. Will the Minister tell us how far the Government have started to implement some of the recommendations? In particular, I echo the Committee’s concerns about the importance of treatment and the availability of support at the prison gate to prevent recovering addicts from relapsing, especially because of the recent changes in the NHS. I understand that in-prison drug treatment is being commissioned not in the locality but by a national agency, but that what happens when the person leaves prison and returns to the community depends on the commissioning arrangements of the clinical commissioning group and the health and wellbeing board.

[Keith Vaz]

I thank my hon. Friend for taking part in the debate. Given the state of her voice, she probably needs a prescription, so I am grateful to her.

What is the Opposition’s position on compulsory testing on entry and exit? Everyone wants to help people, but if we do not know who needs help we cannot really give that help.

[Diana Johnson]

The Chair of the Select Committee makes a powerful argument for having data that allow us to understand the number of people affected and therefore how to treat them. I am sure the Opposition would want to consider that, recognising that the issue has been raised by the Committee, which sees it as an important part of tackling some of the problems in prison.

Will the Minister also address an issue that has arisen since the report was published, which is the use of the private sector in the probation services provided to people leaving prison? What thought has been given to ensuring that appropriate drug treatment and support is available through the new providers?

At the start of this Parliament, there was a lot of political rhetoric from Government Members about what constituted recovery, to which the hon. Member for Cambridge referred. The view at first appeared to be based on ideology and not on looking at the individual needs of each person. For some people a life of abstinence would be appropriate; for others, a life supported by methadone or another drug. When people want to move to abstinence, it is important that they have the necessary support to do so, and that a range of programmes are available to support them.

The Committee’s report highlights the large variations in the success of different programmes, which is of concern, because we want to ensure good value for money and that we get the right outcomes. An average success level of 41% could obviously be improved upon. Payment by results should help to improve standards, but I echo the concerns expressed by the Committee, and this afternoon by its Chair, about how that method of funding might hamper small providers. It is also important that support is given to a range of commissioning bodies to enable them to sort through the data on what is effective. Given the multitude of different commissioners, can the Minister explain what role Public Health England will play in guiding commissioners?

Of course, we all want to see fewer people taking drugs in the first place, and I will concentrate for a few moments on the need to have more effort directed at prevention. I agree with the Committee that drugs prevention and education are the strands of the drugs strategy to have had least work and least interest. In the review of the drugs strategy, the Government could identify just two areas of progress: they had relaunched the FRANK website, and they were reviewing the curriculum for schools. Since then, the curriculum review has finished, but my understanding is that there will now be even less drugs education in the science curriculum. That cannot be seen as progress. At the same time, the Government have abandoned Labour’s plans to make personal, social, health and economic education a statutory requirement for schools and have closed the drugs education forum.

Figures from Mentor, the drug and alcohol charity, show that at present 60% of schools deliver drug and alcohol education once a year or less. That education is often poor, incomplete or totally irrelevant; pupils aged 16 seem to get the same lessons as pupils aged 11. An example given was of sixth-form students being required to colour in pictures of ecstasy tablets as part of their drugs education. Earlier this year, Mentor told me:

“Drug and alcohol education should not be disregarded as a trivial add-on. It should be fundamental to pupils’ education. The links between early drug and alcohol use and both short and long term harms are clear, and there is compelling evidence showing longer term public health impacts of evidence based programmes. The cost benefit ratios are significant, ranging from 1:8 to 1:12.”

The Committee’s report is clear:

“The evidence suggests that early intervention should be an integral part of any policy which is to be effective in breaking the cycle of drug dependency. We recommend that the next version of the Drugs Strategy contain a clear commitment to an effective drugs education and prevention programme, including behaviour-based interventions.”

I wholeheartedly support that, and I repeat Labour’s commitment to bringing in statutory PSHE to achieve it, which I tried to do recently myself by introducing a ten-minute rule Bill in the previous Session.

For the interim, the Committee recommends

“that Public Health England commit centralised funding for preventative interventions when pilots are proven to be effective.”

Again, that is something I support. The Department for Education has a set of programmes that have been approved and are listed on the Centre for the Analysis of Youth Transitions database. A wide range of programmes, they are all evidence-based and have been tested and proved to be effective. They are life-skills programmes that not only tell children no, but empower them to resist peer pressure and to make informed decisions about alcohol and drugs. Furthermore, they dispel myths such as those going around suggesting legal highs are safe. What is unfortunately lacking at the moment, however, is the political leadership to get those lessons into schools.

I mentioned earlier my attempts to see the minutes of the inter-ministerial group on drugs. I never managed to get the minutes of the meetings, but I did get the agendas, which showed that in the first 18 months of this Government drugs education and drugs prevention were never discussed. Can the Minister tell us whether he has put either drugs education or drug prevention on the agenda of the group in the nine months that he has been chair? If not, perhaps he can promise to put something on the agenda of the next meeting. Previously, when there was a problem with prioritising drug treatment within the NHS, Ministers came together to form the National Treatment Agency. There now appears to be a problem with prioritising prevention work in schools and education and in public health, so perhaps the Minister can show a similar initiative and work with his colleagues to set up a cross-departmental body to tackle the issue.

Finally, I want to discuss the problem of the new psychoactive substances. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction is now monitoring 280 new substances throughout Europe; 73 new substances came on to the British market last year, and they are now freely available from 690 online shops. In addition, the Angelus Foundation, which has already been mentioned, reports that there might be up to 300 “head shops” selling those substances on the UK high street. The figures are truly shocking and will terrify every parent in the country, but even those figures do not quite show how readily available the drugs are through peer-to-peer selling in schools. As the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee mentioned, even Amazon was recently selling the drugs, and some online sellers are sending out free samples to children once a new compound arrives from China. Our understanding of the dangers of legal highs has been greatly enhanced by the work of the Angelus Foundation, and I pay particular tribute to Maryon Stewart who founded the foundation after tragically losing her daughter, Hester Stewart, a medical student, from the legal high GBL in 2009.

As we heard, the Government have introduced temporary banning orders to make such drugs easier to prohibit. The Home Secretary promised that they would allow for swift and effective action. In two years, however, one temporary banning order has been used, during a period when more than 100 new legal highs have emerged on the market. I understand from the press that two more temporary banning orders are in the pipeline, which I will come on to.

The first thing we need to do to get better understanding of the harms of such drugs is, as the Select Committee said in its report, to improve data collection on drugs. Nowhere is that more pressing than with the new psychoactive substances. First, we need better information about their prevalence. I am very concerned that those drugs are not being properly recorded in the Mixmag drug survey or the British crime survey.

Secondly, we need to understand the harm they cause. I have heard from front-line practitioners in addiction services and A and E that they are encountering more and more people who have taken legal highs, but that is anecdotal and we need proper data collection. If someone presents to A and E having taken a legal high, that should be properly recorded.

Thirdly, we need the major databases to work together. For the last year, I have tried to ascertain how the EMCDDA database liaises with the Home Office’s much-touted early warning system. Last year, I asked why it was monitoring 13 substances when the EMCDDA had 47 on its list, but I have still not received a satisfactory explanation. I would also like to know how the Home Office’s system is informed by the TICTAC database of toxins, which is run by the NHS, and the National Poisons Information Service’s TOXBASE. In the past, work on collecting data was done by the Forensic Science Service, but it has been disbanded. I hope that the Minister will explain who is doing that work now.

This week, the Government announced that they will finally ban Benzo Fury. It is clear from the letter that the Home Secretary received from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that there are real concerns that the system that has been set up is failing. The drug has been putting people in hospital since 2009, when it was first reported to TOXBASE, and since then there have been 65 more referrals. Will the Minister explain the point of a temporary banning order if it takes four years from the first hospital admissions to a ban on the sale of the drug on the high street? No deaths from this drug have been reported in the UK, but deaths have been reported in other countries. Professor Les Iversen, chair of the ACMD, said:

“Sooner or later we will get unexpected and serious harm emerging with one of these compounds and then we will blame ourselves for allowing them to be sold without the usual safety data.

That’s why I think this is a serious problem, it's not just a nice set of party drugs that we can let people get on with, it's a set of chemicals that are potentially very dangerous.”

I hope the Minister will respond to that comment.

The Committee’s report recommends that more advice and support be given to allow trading standards to take action against sellers, and that recommendation was also made by the UK Drug Policy Commission. What has the Minister done to investigate implementation of those two recommendations? Several recent attempts to take action through the courts have failed, and trading standards are already exceptionally stretched because of the massive cuts in local government. I hope the Minister will review that, and look at who is responsible for tackling online sellers.

I have highlighted a few of the key issues in the report, but there are many others. I again congratulate the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee—

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Home Department (Mr Jeremy Browne)]

I hope to continue the high level of debate on which the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) commented. I am grateful, Mr Bayley, for this opportunity to serve under your distinguished chairmanship and to debate this important subject with hon. Members who take a particularly close interest in the topic.

Like others, I congratulate the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee and its members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), on their interest in the matter and their attention to detail in compiling a lengthy and insightful report which, as the Committee’s Chairman reminded us, the Government have accepted in part but not in full. He and other members of the Committee were pleased that the Government were willing to accept some recommendations, and I will touch on some of them during my deliberations. Instead of giving a completely off-the-peg Home Office Minister’s speech—I may do that in part—I want to engage with some of the themes that have emerged during the debate.

Some extreme libertarians may not accept the harm premise, or they may believe that people should be entirely free to inflict harm on themselves, but the mainstream debate, by and large, starts with acceptance of that premise. I think that everyone who has participated today accepts that drugs are often harmful and may be extremely harmful, and that it is in the interests of the Government and Parliament to try to reduce the harm caused by drugs that may sometimes lead to death, or to severe injury and disability that may last for the rest of someone’s life.

Quite a few people reach for the view that there is a right answer and a wrong answer to the problem of drugs and the harm they cause, and that a royal commission or some other august body of dispassionate people could tell us what it is, or that we could go to another country that has done the work before us and it could tell us the right answer, which we could adopt and solve all our problems. My experience of this difficult area of policy making is, sadly, that it is far more difficult and complicated. Many well-meaning, expert and informed people can come to different conclusions about how best to address the problem.

There are reasons for cautious optimism about Government policy and its impact on society, and about how society is evolving in comparable countries, particularly in our part of the world. There are signs of progress. Some may be a direct result of Government intervention and some may arise from the evolution of society, which is less easy to attribute directly to Government action. However, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic, and I will come to them shortly.

If there was a straightforward answer—for example, to decriminalise drugs—it would be a persuasive path for many people, but we have just heard from the Chairman of the Select Committee that when it went to Miami it saw the chronic problem of people addicted to decriminalised legal drugs. One issue in this debate is the growing problem of legal highs. In this country, consumption of illegal drugs has reduced, but consumption of legal drugs has increased. That presents all sorts of thorny and interesting public policy issues, but does not automatically lead to the conclusion that the more drugs we legalise, or at least decriminalise, the better the effect on public health. The effect may be better—I am not ruling that out altogether—but I caution everybody in this debate not to leap to immediate conclusions about public policy outcomes, because in my experience, the more carefully one looks at the issue, the less obvious the conclusions become.

[Keith Vaz]

I welcome the way in which the Minister is dealing with the issues raised in the debate. On legal highs, does he agree with the Committee that those who sell them need to be responsible for what they do? Would he look at the New Zealand model and try and adopt it, because it means that the responsibility is on the manufacturer? They should not be manufacturing drugs that end up killing people.

[Mr Browne]

I am very attracted by the right hon. Gentleman’s suggestion. My intention at the moment is not to go to New Zealand, in part because I am mindful of the cost of doing so and I think we should spend public money cautiously. However, I will be speaking by video conference call to New Zealand officials next month—it is quite hard to get a suitable time to speak by conference call to New Zealand, because the time difference is so big, but I will do that. When suitable New Zealand officials or Ministers are here in London—they tend to pass through on a fairly routine basis—I also hope to take the opportunity to draw on their expertise.

I am attracted by the idea of whether people should be made more accountable for the drugs that they produce or sell in this space, but even that is not straightforward, because the issue often arises about who has produced the drugs, and they are often sold as not suitable for human consumption. All kinds of legal problems make what appears, on first inspection, to be a very seductive idea slightly less straightforward in practice than I would wish, but I am open-minded to what more we can do in that area, because it is worth exploring.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Browne]

This is a wider issue. I will engage seriously with the question, because I think that it is fair. It is about the degree to which we, as a Government and a country, use schools to inculcate desirable behaviour in children of school age. There is a powerful lobby in the House—I have received its representations—that says that it is crucial for part of the curriculum in schools to be about tackling drugs and the harmful effects of drugs.

I have also had representations from people saying that children should be taught in school about sexually appropriate relationships and that that should be part of the curriculum. I have also been told that children should be taught in school about responsible financial management, because children leave school without necessarily being able to make mature decisions about their personal finances. I have also been told that children should be taught in school how to cook properly, because large numbers of children are not as adept as hon. Members at this debate are at making delicious meals for themselves and that that should be part of the curriculum. I have been told that healthy eating more generally should be part of the curriculum in schools because otherwise children would eat unhealthy food through ignorance rather than because they preferred the taste of unhealthy food. I have also been told that there should be more awareness of alcohol and the dangers of cigarettes and that there should be more public health information generally.

The point that I am making is that there is a reasonable nervousness in the Department for Education that, unless we try to rationalise the activities that children are taught about in school, all of which are individually worthy—I think that everyone would accept that—teachers might get to the end of the school day and find that there is not much time left to teach children some of the core academic subjects that parents rightly expect them to be taught. There is a genuine debate about whether schools are there primarily to create good citizens or to educate children in core areas of academic knowledge. There is scope for a bit of a trade-off. Most people would want their children to be adept at maths, English literature and other typical academic subjects and to be rounded citizens at the same time, but there are only so many hours in the day and the Department for Education has to make some judgments about how to fill those hours intelligently.

On supply, we work closely with partner countries in Europe particularly. While I was in Portugal, I also took the opportunity to visit MAOC—the maritime analysis and operations centre—which is an initiative primarily involving Atlantic-facing European countries, although I think that the Dutch are also involved. They do not really face the Atlantic; it depends how far one thinks the Atlantic goes down the English channel. But the United Kingdom, the French, the Portuguese, the Spanish and others are working to try to intercept drug shipments.

Before becoming a Home Office Minister, I was a Foreign Office Minister who covered, among other places, Latin America. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has met the Presidents of Colombia and Panama. Home Office Ministers have met the Interior Ministers of Colombia and Brazil and the Foreign Ministers of Bolivia and the Dominican Republic. But I hope that I do not sound immodest when I say that I suspect that, probably more than anyone else in government, I have an insight into the countries that we have talked about. Since this Government formed, I have been to Colombia on three occasions and Peru on two occasions. I have been to Bolivia; I have been to Ecuador; I have been to Panama on two occasions and so on.

In the countries that I am talking about, the issue is cocaine, and there is indeed a severe impact on those countries. We recognise our responsibilities to them as a consuming country. We work closely with the Governments of all those countries to varying degrees and certainly with the President and Government of Colombia, to whom many in this debate have already paid tribute.

Recovery is an area where there is quite a lot of innovative public policy making. We have the world’s first payment-by-results programme to try to incentivise recovery outcomes. It is being piloted in eight areas, and I have attended an extensive meeting with people from the eight areas in the Department of Health to talk to them about the progress that they are making in Bracknell Forest, Enfield, Kent, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Stockport, Wakefield and Wigan. We are optimistic that they will make good progress, but they will not all make identical progress. Part of what will be interesting about the pilot studies is how local providers, tailoring their services to their local problem, will produce outcomes that we hope will reduce harm and drug taking and enable people to recover in their areas.

There is an interesting debate, which I think my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge touched on, about how one measures recovery. We have had that debate in Government. I accept, as I think most people do, that it represents progress when we take someone whose life is chaotic, who is a drug taker and who is unable to work or to take responsibility for themselves in quite elementary ways and we stabilise their life—perhaps through some programme of replacement drug treatment—so that that they can perhaps address some of their underlying social problems and, in time, find a job. I would not want the Government to fail to recognise that, because a lot of people, including in the voluntary sector, work to try to bring about that progress, which leads to improved outcomes for the people affected and, in many cases, for their spouses, their children and others around them.

The only caveat that I would enter is that the Government are cautious about regarding that as a desirable end point. Although some people may struggle to get beyond that point, most people—if they were talking about their own children, for example—would regard it as a desirable interim point. Ideally, however, they would like the end point to be that the person was free from addiction to whatever substance has made their lives so blighted and difficult in the first place.

There is an interesting, worthwhile and entirely valid debate about the point at which progress starts to put down roots and just becomes the new normal. If someone has been moved from a chaotic life on drugs to an ordered and managed life on drugs, that is definitely progress. If, 10 or 15 years later, they are living an ordered and managed life on drugs, one could argue that it is time for a bit more progress, and we might try to get them through to an end point where they are no longer on drugs at all.

What we do not want to do is to institutionalise the interim measure; we want to make interim progress, because that is better than making no progress at all, but we have to be careful about progress freezing before it has reached its most desirable destination. That is an insight into the conversations that we are having. Of course, if we are looking at payment by results, we then have to think about how we incentivise people not only to make progress but to complete the journey, rather than to leave it half completed.

The Ministry of Justice is doing lots of extra and innovative work on rehabilitation and on how to help offenders. The Government were not minded to accept the Committee’s recommendation on drug testing in and out of prison because we remain of the view that random testing is superior and that people who know when they will be tested may take measures to avoid showing up as positive. Other people may have different views, but we had good motives for objecting to that recommendation.

A lot of work is going on in the Ministry of Justice, rather than directly in my Department, on how we can help people who leave prison with a modest amount of money—£46, I think—and few other support structures to get back on their feet and rebuild a meaningful life, with housing and employment, rather than lapsing back into criminality. There are two interesting pilot studies on payment by results and on trying to incentivise prison providers to help people with rehabilitation once they have left prison.

[Keith Vaz]

But the point is this: is it not wrong that so many of the people we send to prison get the drugs habit there? Does that not show that something is wrong with the prison regime? If people are tested, helped and rehabilitated when they are in prison, things will be much better for everybody when they come out.

[Mr Browne]

My short answer to the right hon. Gentleman’s question is yes, it is wrong. It is a source of great regret and sadness that someone might go to prison, not as a drug taker or drug addict, and become one while they are there. I recognise there are practical difficulties with trying to restrict drugs in prisons, and people find ingenious ways to smuggle drugs into prisons, just as they find ingenious ways to smuggle them into other places, but the Government are doing work, as we should be, to try to reduce that threat.

What I am saying is that we could just as well do random testing throughout the period people are in prison. I have been told that if we tell somebody they will be tested on a set day, they may take steps to make it less likely that drugs will be detected in their body on that day. We are not, therefore, against the idea of testing prisoners, and we are strongly in favour of trying to ensure that people do not take drugs in prison, while those who might be minded to take drugs are dissuaded or prevented from doing so, but the proposed testing regime would not necessarily automatically have the most successful outcome.

On the Government’s approach to reducing demand, it is worth putting on the record that drug use remains at around the lowest level since measurement began in 1996. The 2011-12 crime survey in England and Wales estimated that 8.9% of adults—about 3 million people—had used an illicit drug in the previous year. In 1996, the figure was 11.1%, so there was a fall of a bit less than a quarter—about 20%, according to my rough and ready calculations. There was therefore a significant fall in the number of people who said they had taken illicit drugs in the previous year.

School pupils also tell us they are taking fewer drugs. In 2011, 12% of 11 to 15-year-olds said they had taken them in the previous year. In 2001—a decade earlier—the figure was 20%, so it fell from 20% to 12% in a decade. Some hon. Members may think that 11 to 15-year-olds are not entirely reliable when talking about their drug consumption, but there is no particular reason to believe they were any more or less reliable in 2011 than they were in 2001.

The number of heroin and crack cocaine users in England has fallen below 300,000 for the first time. We have now got to a situation where the average heroin addict is over 40. The age of heroin addicts is going up and up, as fewer young people become heroin addicts in the first place. We are trying to rehabilitate and treat addicts and to keep those figures falling. They are not falling dramatically, but they are falling consistently, year on year, for those very serious drugs, which often concern people most.

On restricting supply, we have talked a bit about the countries that some of the class A drugs come here from and about the work we are doing with European partners and others. Tribute has rightly been paid to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and the National Crime Agency, which will succeed it later this year, will also have a focus on working with countries around the world to reduce harm in the United Kingdom.

On building recovery, the average waiting time to access treatment is down to five days. There is an impressive support structure available, and drug-related deaths in England have fallen over the past three years. Record numbers of people are recovering from dependence, with nearly 30,000 people—29,855, to be precise—successfully completing their treatment in 2011-12. That is up from 27,969 the previous year, and it is almost three times the level seven years ago, when only 11,208 people recovered.

I do not pretend that we have all the answers or that the situation is perfect, but we should not despair, because, in the light of all those statistics, there is good reason to believe that the harm resulting from many of the drugs that have caused people the most upset and alarm over many years has diminished to a degree.

The problem is evolving. For example, cannabis, which was largely imported a decade ago, is increasingly home grown by criminal organisations in the United Kingdom. The cannabis that people consume is also a lot stronger. I sometimes tell people that the active substance in cannabis is as much as seven or eight times stronger than it was, so people can be talking about quite a different drug. Sometimes, older people talk about cannabis in a bit of a summer of love, Janis Joplin, 1967 way. Now, however, we are talking about a much stronger drug, with the potential to cause greater harm.

It is a bit like going from drinking a pint of real ale to drinking a pint of neat vodka. In both cases, an alcoholic drink is being consumed, but most people would accept that the potential for harm is quite a lot greater in the latter case. That is what we are discussing. The strength of modern cannabis is seven times greater, which raises some interesting public policy questions about how we deal with cannabis and how much concern we should have about people consuming it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz]

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Betts, even though the sign in front of you, which has not been changed, still describes you as the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley), so we shall perhaps ever more call you by the previous Chair’s name.

The debate has been excellent and I thank the Minister, the shadow Minister, who is suffering greatly with her throat infection, and the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) for taking part. As the shadow Minister said, it is not about the numbers present, it is about the quality of the contributions, and the Minister’s approach has been extremely measured and positive.

The Select Committee on Home Affairs will look again at the subject in six months, but we promise to do so every 12 months when we publish a report. At the moment, the Government have adopted five of the 10 recommendations—50%. We encourage the Minister’s trips around the world. We do not usually like to see Ministers, in particular those from the Home Office, go abroad, but we understand the need to travel. Actually, I think it would be a good idea for him to take the shadow Minister with him in this era of cross-party co-operation on drugs, because there is much cross-party agreement on what we should do. Perhaps she should go with him after she has had treatment for her throat, and we could get a cross-Parliament approach.

We will continue to monitor the matter, and I am grateful to the Minister for his indications. He has shown that he is prepared to listen to the shadow Minister, which is extremely important, but also to the hon. Member for Cambridge, who originally suggested this inquiry to the Home Affairs Committee. He has done the most work and has been as assiduous as always, passing between Bill Committees and sittings of the Home Affairs Committee, and the report will be important to reflect on in future.

Question put and agreed to.

Abu Qatada

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend and others have been raising for some time the possibility of our simply defying our international legal obligations and putting Abu Qatada on a plane. My answer to her today is the same as the answer that I have given to others in the past: I believe that the UK Government should abide by the rule of law.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

This has turned into a political and judicial farce. The Home Secretary has spent a huge amount of time on the issue, and she must feel very let down by the Home Office silks who kept telling her that there was enough evidence to remove Abu Qatada. While of course I welcome the treaty that she has signed, it does seem extraordinary that we have conducted a treaty with a foreign Government just to remove one individual. Is she satisfied that that will be enough, or does she think that it will be necessary for her to go to Jordan to deal with any other outstanding points? Can she also assure us that if the Court wants to hear from the Jordanian Government as an amicus curiae, the Jordanian Government will be able to put representations directly to it?

[Mrs May]

I have made it clear at every stage that we should continue to talk to the Jordanian Government, and should do our utmost to ensure that we can achieve what is wanted by every Member in the Chamber, and, I believe, by all members of the public, namely the deportation of Abu Qatada. We have been clear about our twin-track approach, and we continue that approach.

I must challenge the right hon. Gentleman on one point. As I said, we have signed a wide-ranging mutual legal assurance agreement with the Jordanian Government, which will affect the deportations of individuals in both directions regardless of whether or not they are Abu Qatada. It so happens that within that agreement are fair trial guarantees that could be applied in the case of Abu Qatada, but the agreement itself is a wider document, which has been signed by the two Governments and which, following full ratification in both the Jordanian Parliament and our Parliament, will take the status of a treaty.

Immigration (Bulgaria and Romania)

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I apologise to the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) and to other hon. Members present that I was not here at the beginning of the eloquent opening speech. I and other parliamentary colleagues were attending the 20th anniversary memorial service for Stephen Lawrence at St Martin-in-the-Fields, which was still going on when I left.

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate, and the thousands of people who signed the e-petition. He put his case in his usual elegant and eloquent way, and very robustly. Although I do not think that we will get a solution in this Chamber today to the problems he has raised, I hope that by having the debate we can show the public and those who signed the e-petition that Parliament is prepared to discuss this very important issue openly and transparently, and not leave it to fringe parties that are not represented in Parliament to take control of the debate.

As the hon. Gentleman said, there are now eight months to go before the lifting of transitional arrangements, which, broken down, is 6,072 hours, 253 days or 36 weeks. My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) said that we are a Parliament that welcomes enlargement—the enlargement arrangements went through the House with no one voting against them. I declare my interest as Minister for Europe when the enlargement of the EU began in earnest, and I well remember visiting Bucharest and Sofia, and the other eastern European countries, and telling them that Government and Opposition were united in ensuring that Romania and Bulgaria, and indeed the other countries, should enter the EU, so that for the first time in many decades we would have a united Europe.

I welcome enlargement. It has provided enormous benefits for our country, and in a discussion of this kind we should recognise that it has been an essential part of the European policy of successive Governments. However, there is a clear national feeling, the depth and scale of which is shown by the number of people—some 145,462—who had signed the e-petition by 2 pm today, and unless we discuss the matter, and unless the Government are prepared to come up with some solutions to the issues that have been raised, I fear that this will become a dominant issue as we approach the next general election. It is therefore important that we have this debate.

Tomorrow, the Home Affairs Committee will take evidence from not only the Romanian and Bulgarian ambassadors—it is important that we hear their side in Parliament—but the Minister, and I will listen to his speech and those of other hon. Members so that I can prepare my notes for his session before us tomorrow.

The hon. Member for The Wrekin was absolutely right: at the heart of this debate is the issue of numbers—the estimates. Over many months, at Home Office questions and through written parliamentary questions, I have pressed the Home Secretary and the Minister on the need for estimates. On 21 October 2008, the then shadow Immigration Minister, the right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green), said that one of the greatest failures of the last Government was the failure to predict the consequences of enlargement in 2004. That is why it is vital that we get proper estimates of how many people will come here on 1 January next year.

[Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)]

I do not say this in a tongue in cheek way, but the right hon. Gentleman was the Minister for Europe at the time the first accessions were happening, so what advice can he give the Government about getting the right estimates? The last Labour Government’s estimates were truly, wholly and completely inaccurate, and he would have been in receipt of them. Based on his experience, what questions should the Minister ask his officials?

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman will have to wait for my memoirs to get all the information, but he is right that critical questions should have been asked. The headlong rush to try to enlarge the EU, which was supported by the Government and the Opposition, did not really take into consideration the numbers who would eventually come. The question was never really put properly and never really answered, which is why, with the benefit of hindsight, I hope Ministers will learn from the mistakes that were made, and mistakes were made, because research should have been commissioned. I hope he will learn from the mistakes made by myself and others, who did not ask the right questions.

[Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman not recall whether, since other countries had transitional controls in place, it was considered that Britain should perhaps do the same? Was there a thought process that he went through?

[Keith Vaz]

At the end of the day, although one wants to big oneself up as Minister for Europe, the decision was finally made at a much higher level, and I am not trying to pass on responsibility. However, the fact is that we should have looked at that and at the reasons why these things happened. That is why I hope we can learn from the mistakes that were made and ensure that proper research is commissioned, but the Government have categorically refused to do that.

[Chris Bryant]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

Only my mother calls me Christopher, Mr Walker. However, while reading recently, I was struck by the fact that the person who produced the original report for the then Government claims that, if we read all 85 pages, it was remarkably accurate on probable EU migration from the A8 countries to the UK. Unfortunately, all the different political classes at the time relied only on a headline, which was wholly inaccurate. I suspect that it is possible to map out the numbers rather better than has been done in relation to next year.

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend was my successor as Minister for Europe, and I do not know whether he had the chance to look at any other documents, but whatever the debates and the arguments were, we were where we were. Bearing in mind that we were in that position, let us not repeat the same mistake.

The estimates of the number of people coming here after 31 December range from 10,000, according to the Romanian ambassador and research commissioned in Romania, to 50,000, according to Migration Watch, as the hon. Member for The Wrekin correctly said. That is a big difference—about 40,000 people. We need to look at that as the central part of our debate about Romania and Bulgaria.

[Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman seemed to say that the questions that should have been put were not put, while the shadow Minister says that a detailed report actually set all these things out but was ignored. Those two positions are clearly contradictory. Why is that?

[Keith Vaz]

Not really, because I finished being Minister for Europe in 2001, and enlargement took place in 2004, so I do not know what report he is referring to. As the hon. Gentleman will find out when he serves in government and then ceases to be in government, Ministers are not prepared to share their reports with former Ministers, unfortunately—perhaps we should ensure that that changes.

[Mr Hollobone]

May I gently correct the right hon. Gentleman? I am following his speech closely. The 50,000 people a year estimate he mentioned from Migration Watch is in fact a central estimate. The range Migration Watch gives is between 30,000 and 70,000 per year.

[Keith Vaz]

That is extremely helpful. That is the figure I have.

Let me move on to the next report that was commissioned: the report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to this Government. The report contains no estimates, and when that was put to the Home Secretary on 18 December, when she appeared before the Home Affairs Committee, she said she was “looking at the issue”. On 23 January, she said that, given the uncertainties, it was not “practicable to draw” any “conclusions on future numbers”. However, on the BBC on 13 January, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government said there would be an “influx” of Romanians and Bulgarians, increasing pressure in terms of existing housing shortages. Only last Thursday, when the Home Secretary appeared before the Select Committee, she could provide us with no further information. On 20 February, the Deputy Prime Minister said on his weekly LBC show that there were “guesstimates”. He added that he would not “lend too much credence to estimates which may well go on to prove to be inaccurate”.

At the heart of this is the need for us to have clear estimates and predictions, and we can, because we all acknowledge that this is an issue, so we might as well get the estimates and the research done. I hope the Minister will say he will do that when he responds to the hon. Member for The Wrekin later in the debate, and certainly before he comes to the Select Committee.

[Wayne David]

Does my right hon. Friend accept that one very real difficulty in estimating the numbers likely to come here from Romania and Bulgaria is that many of the calculations are based on what happened when the A8 countries were allowed to have full access to our markets? At that time, the British economy was booming; now it is flatlining.

[Keith Vaz]

That is absolutely right. In addition, of course, a number of other countries will also lift their restrictions on 31 December—a point the Home Secretary made to the Select Committee. Even given that, however, it is still important to have the information at hand so that we can have an informed debate and make an informed judgment. We need that information when we look at local services, which I think are at the kernel of local people’s criticisms when they sign this petition; indeed, the second part of it is all about benefits, housing shortages and, indeed, access to medical care. If we do not have the information, our services will be under enormous pressure.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

We need to learn the lessons of the past properly. Three members of the Public Accounts Committee are here today—my hon. Friends the Members for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) and for North East Cambridgeshire (Stephen Barclay) and myself—and we see only too regularly examples of Departments operating in silos and the inability of the best of our civil service to understand the reports they provide to Ministers. I therefore wonder whether there was much cross-departmental working on reports in the right hon. Gentleman’s time and the time of the shadow Minister. The right hon. Gentleman has just mentioned a number of Departments, and I wonder whether the Minister can talk about the cross-departmental working that is going on now to deal with these issues.

[Keith Vaz]

It is important that the matter should cross Departments. Yes, there was some work—I cannot remember all of it, because it was 13 years ago—but I am worried, knowing that there are three members of the Public Accounts Committee present, that it might call me to give evidence. I cannot remember anything very much, so it would be better to call my successors as Minister for Europe. They might be able to help.

On the point about benefits, it is worth noting that at the time of the A8 enlargement, the number of Poles claiming JSA was less than 7,000 out of the 500,000 who came here. However, I recall a parliamentary reply about the number of people from EU countries who claim benefits for children who are not resident here; I think that that came to £50 million a year. I think that it is not so much the right of people to claim benefits if they pay taxes and contribute to the economy, as the fact that some people claim benefits when their children are not even resident, that upsets the British people, who, as the hon. Member for The Wrekin has said, are a very tolerant and understanding lot. However, they will not stand for abuse of the system, and people taking advantage of a system to which they have not contributed.

I accept the point made by the hon. Member for The Wrekin, whom I have known for many years, that there are jobs that are difficult to fill, such as fruit-picking—I cannot quite imagine him picking strawberries in Shropshire, but am trying to fix that in my mind—but the Romanian and Bulgarian communities in this country are making a contribution to the economy and paying tax, even though the majority of them are self-employed. We have 6,000 students; we have doctors, nurses, professionals and people in all walks of life. The hon. Gentleman need only go to certain parts of north and west London to see the contribution that those people make. Of course there are certain jobs that cannot be filled, but those people already contribute to the operation of the country.

One way in which we can deal with the issue is by beginning an effective dialogue with the Governments of Romania and Bulgaria. For some reason known only to the Home Secretary, for six months she resisted telling me whether she had ever visited Romania. Eventually, when she gave evidence last Thursday to the Home Affairs Committee, she admitted that she had not; it is all right—we shall not ask the Minister the same question tomorrow. I can suggest a way of dealing with the issue, with a friendly EU country with which we do business every day, and with which we want to keep friendly relations, not least because we have begun our negotiation process with countries such as Romania and Bulgaria to try to put a package towards the British people for the referendum that is going to come—and as the hon. Member for The Wrekin and other hon. Members know, I fully support a referendum on whether we stay in the EU or come out. It would be helpful if the Home Secretary or the Minister for Immigration would go to Bucharest or Sophia and speak to their opposite numbers to see what can be done to make the transition as smooth as possible, and find out the root causes of migration from those countries—and not just rely on a BBC poll, helpful though that is—and I am sure that “Newsnight” will present a good programme tonight—it is such personal contacts that are important. I hope that the Minister will take the opportunity to do that in the next few months.

The Home Affairs Committee is, as I have said, conducting an inquiry on the matter. We are also considering the effect of the European arrest warrant and the Government’s proposals. We tagged on a visit to Romania before our visit to Poland, and we shall produce a report, thanks to work done by the hon. Members for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) and for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), who have driven the issue in the Committee. We hope that we can come up with a balanced report that will take into consideration the views that have been expressed in the debate today, but also the views of outside groups, including the embassies and, indeed, Migration Watch UK.

Let us not lose sight of one important fact: we have good relations with Romania and Bulgaria. I pay tribute to the Romanian ambassador, Ion Jinga, and to Ambassador Konstantin Dimitrov, who throughout the debate have been balanced in what they have said. I pay tribute also to Martin Harris, our ambassador in Bucharest, who recently won an award for excellence in communication in the relationship between our two countries. What I have to say is directed not at hon. Members, who are not those responsible, but at those in other political parties not represented in Parliament, who put out election leaflets that are simply not true. Let us have a debate about the issue, and a report based on facts. More than anything else, let us have the estimates and predictions. It will make our task, at the beginning of next year, much easier.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Barclay]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I have raised the point repeatedly with Ministers; I certainly was not trying to belittle it. The point that I was trying to make was that where we have legal powers already, to what extent are we using them? Are we using them to the full? My hon. Friend is right: the estimate that I saw suggested that there are about 15,000 illegal vehicles currently on the road. That has implications if they are in an accident; are they traceable? There is a lost economy issue. Our garages would be getting business from MOT-ing them. The insurers would be generating revenue from them. I make the point for illustrative purposes: it raises a wider point about unfairness within a community, which is not conducive to cohesion.

[Keith Vaz]

I have not come across that point before and I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising it. Is he saying that it applies only to Romanian and Bulgarian citizens who are currently in this country, or is it a wider issue involving other EU nationals?

[Stephen Barclay]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for the opportunity to clarify my remarks. It is a wider point. If someone brings a vehicle into the United Kingdom from the European Union, they can drive it for six months without it being licensed in the United Kingdom, but after six months it has to be licensed. The difficulty is that the police will say, “We don’t know when the six months started,” yet in the case of a British driver taking their car to Spain, where the same law applies, the burden is on them to prove when the six months started—for example, by showing their tickets for the ferry when they took it across. Again, there is no ownership of the issue, it seems. That is why I think that action is needed.

My third example is one that I have been in discussion with HMRC about, but again it will apply to Bulgaria and Romania when people from those countries migrate. I am referring to counterfeit goods. Often within the migrant community, there is great pressure on those who have come into the country and are in the low-skilled jobs to take, as part of a bundled package of services, counterfeit goods. Again, I think that there has been a tendency in Government to see that as pretty low-level crime, but it is not; it is quite serious. Often there are health consequences from the vodka and other products, such as cigarettes, that are being sold, but also there is a revenue issue. With that in mind, I very much welcome the multi-agency taskforce that the Minister and his colleague the Home Secretary have set up.

In conclusion, I welcome what the Minister and his colleagues are doing in terms of renegotiation. I think that we need to take all the action that we can, although I recognise that there are constraints. There is significant success in his work on the pull factors. I think that there is a cross-Government desire to grip that issue—that is clear—but I urge him to look, in relation to those who are already here, at whether we are using the full range of our legal powers and to demonstrate that ahead of 2014, so that when we do have people coming in from Bulgaria and Romania, we are on the front foot and not simply making existing problems worse by increasing their size.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

My inexperience shows itself so frequently that it is a delight to have your experience in the Chair, Mr Howarth—[Interruption.] However, since you are talking to me while I am speaking, I cannot hear you. Spain removed the transitional controls much earlier and put some of them back in place in 2011. [Interruption.] I am so sorry; I am not sure where that comment came from, Mr Howarth. There are more than 1 million Bulgarians and Romanians in Spain, and similar numbers in Italy, which has also withdrawn the transitional controls.

It is important that we consider what drives where an EU migrant might go, although I might reach a slightly different conclusion from some others. Among the most likely things to decide what country an EU migrant, such as one from Bulgaria or Romania, goes to are, first, the law—whether they are allowed to migrate there—which explains the situation we have at the moment. Secondly, there are personal connections. If a person already knows somebody in a country, they are more likely to go there than to another country.

Thirdly, there is language. Several Members have referred to the fact that English is a key factor. Short of persuading Britons not to speak English any more, I am not quite sure what we can do about the fact that English has become the language of business around the world. However, it is also true that one reason many Bulgarians and Romanians have gone to Italy and Spain is that Italian and Spanish are still taught in schools in Bulgaria and Romania, and other Romance languages are a more easy fit; it is much easier for a Bulgarian or a Romanian to learn Italian or Spanish than English.

The fourth factor is where there is work; that is absolutely vital. That is why Germany is still the No. 1 destination for Bulgarians and Romanians. Interestingly, a couple of Members have referred to the “Newsnight” report coming out today and the different ways it has been reported. We could read the figures in many different ways, as hon. Members have, but one figure was quite interesting. When asked whether the benefits system would make a difference to the country they went to, 72% answered, “Not at all”, 8% said it would to a small extent, 5% said it would to a great extent and 3% said it would to a very great extent. We therefore need to be cautious about stating that the benefits system drives whether somebody comes to the United Kingdom, although, as several hon. Members have said, there is a significant difficulty with family benefits provided on a non-contributory basis. Those are tightly regulated by the EU, which is very keen to enforce its directives and case law. That is something we need to look at.

[Keith Vaz]

I am listening to my hon. Friend’s arguments carefully. Would it be a good idea for the Government to commission research so that we know the approximate numbers of people who might come here? He is talking about opinion polls, which are always useful, and we, as politicians, like them. However, would it not be a good idea to have a detailed piece of research on this subject?

[Chris Bryant]

We tend to like opinion polls when we agree with them; if they do not quite agree with us, we dismiss them or we try to reread them in a different way that concurs with our opinion. Sometimes, of course, people ask questions in opinion polls in such a way as to get the answer they want. I am pretty certain the Government have done significant research on this issue. The Foreign Office has already admitted as much in response to a freedom of information request from me, although it said that it is not yet prepared to publish that research. The only reason it is not prepared to give it to me under freedom of information provisions is that it will publish it in the future. That is a somewhat bizarre way of proceeding. Different Ministers have articulated their views about this, but it is a shame that we are not all being treated as the adults we are and that we cannot, therefore, see this material, as Ministers can.

Let me refer to a couple of other issues. First, there is the Labour market.

UK Border Agency

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I thank my right hon. Friend for her remarks. I can indeed confirm that we will be increasing scrutiny of the work that is done in relation to the immigration and visa system and immigration enforcement by bringing it into the Home Office, under a board chaired by the permanent secretary and reporting to Ministers. It is common sense and the right approach to deal with the problem caused by the creation of the agency under the previous Government.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

May I congratulate the Home Secretary on putting the United Kingdom backlogs agency out of its misery by delivering this lethal injection today? May I join her in paying tribute to colleagues on the Home Affairs Committee, especially my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick), for their work over the years in exposing the agency’s shortcomings? I put this option to the Minister for Immigration yesterday and he said that he would reflect on it, so coming back in 24 hours is quite an achievement. Will the Home Secretary give the House an assurance that uppermost in her mind will be the clearing of backlogs, strong and effective leadership and strong parliamentary scrutiny? Only then will we have an immigration system in which the British people can have confidence.

[Mrs May]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comments. As I said, the Home Affairs Committee has been assiduous in its consideration of matters relating to UKBA over the years and has had a consistent message about the need to deal with some of the problems. It is obviously important that we deal with backlogs. It is also important that we ensure that the agency makes the right decisions on an ongoing, day-to-day basis, that those decisions are made not just appropriately but fairly and that people are dealt with properly when they interact with the agency. That will take some time. I think that we share an aim about the quality of system provided, but it will take some time to ensure that we fix all the problems UKBA is having to deal with.